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Hello fellow educators! So there I was at work and I noticed some children throwing up a half empty water bottle into the air in order to watch it flip, fall down, and land up straight. (If you haven't noticed on social media, if the bottle lands up straight, you are officially the coolest. This is a thing now people, keep up.) So I began to think to myself and it hit me, "gravity lesson!" I was thinking that I could incorporate this new "cultural trend" into a gravity science lesson, such as the gravitational pull of the earth is what directs the force of the water downward and therefore makes the bottle land straight. Anyways, this is all very new to me as a baby educator, any ideas on how I can expand on this for an inquiry based lesson? Or perhaps use this for another science topic? Any feedback or ideas very welcomed!

I talked about this a couple of times in my classes. I started with gravity and projectile motion. The kids really enjoyed it because they had a discussion about projectiles based on the "game." I also talked about it when we talked about circular motion because as they discovered you had to have a certain amount of liquid in the bottle to make it work. Too much and it wouldn't land. Talking about rotational inertia and angular momentum of the bottle was fun.

Is there any relationship between the minimum mass of water needed to get the bottle to land and the total volume of the bottle? You could try different sized bottles and see if the same mass is needed to assure the most upright landings.

I did a mini lesson on this with a 6 year old I nanny. We talked about the tides and how the moon's gravity and the sun's gravity create them. He had a lot of fun with it. I wish I would have known about the bottle-trend. He would have really enjoyed doing that and it would have reiterated the information we just experienced.