Skis slide because the thin layer of snow underneath the ski melts from your kinetic energy (skiing) transforming into thermal energy (heat) via friction.

An understanding of the physics of skiing is useful to skiers of all skill levels because it allows them to identify those key physics principles enabling them to properly execute certain moves.

Skiers zigzag down a mountain to help keep their speed and momentum in control – a skier who heads straight down a 30-degree slope can reach over 240km/h.

Wheelbarrow walking develops coordination, balance, and strength as kids imitate a wheelbarrow: hands are the wheels, upper body the barrow, and legs the handles.

Proprioception is the sense that lets us know where our different body parts are, how they move and how much strength our muscles need to use. Kids with sensory processing issues may find wheelbarrow walking helpful as it helps to stimulate this sense.

The number of possible ways of playing the first four moves in a chess game is 318,979,564,000!

In a single game of chess, there are 400 possible board setups after each player has made their first move. After the second pair of moves the number of possible board setups increases to 197,742. After the third pair, there are a whopping 121 million possible setups!

Playing chess uses concentration, logical and sequential thinking, decision making, and lots of mathematics skills.

Cooking is a great example of chemistry hard at work! Freezing, blending, heating, and mixing are all actions that happen in a laboratory AND in a kitchen.

There are some cool chemical reactions that happen when you cook. For example, when you brown food, it looks and tastes different because of something called the Maillard Reaction.

What’s going on? Sugars and amino acids react together and result in the colour and flavour change.

You’ll feel physics in motion every time you hit a tennis ball! Aerodynamics, friction, drag, rotation, collisions, elasticity, gravity, momentum – your eyes and hands learn to calculate all these in a game of tennis.

The success of your shot depends on a variety of factors including how and where the ball strikes your racquet, the velocity of the ball right before impact, the mass of the ball, and the angle of the racquet.

A tennis racquet’s strings are designed to ‘snap back’ and transfer energy back into the ball, sending it soaring.

Researchers have determined that the optimum level of sand ‘wetness’ for building sandcastles is approximately 1 part water to 99 parts dry sand.

This is because when sand is wet, water forms small bridges between the grains of sand. The surface tension of the water then pulls the grains together, so that they are connected by a series of meniscus bridges which gives wet sand its strength.

When enough of these bridges form, the mixture is able to hold its shape, enabling the creation of complex structures such as sandcastles.

Bicycles are one of the most efficient methods of transportation we know of, using less energy to travel than cars, trains, airplanes, boats, and even walking!

Cycling can sometimes feel like hard work, especially if you’re going uphill. In the science of cycling, ‘hard work’ means that you sometimes have to use quite a lot of force to pedal. If you’re going uphill, you need to work against the force of gravity.

The bicycle land speed record is 296km/h achieved by Denise Mueller-Korenek in 2018. How fast can you cycle?

Perfecting your handstand requires an acute awareness of your centre of mass – a common concept in physics.

It’s easier to do a handstand with your legs apart because this helps to keep your centre of mass near your belly button and above your wrists.

If you start to fall forward, press hard into your fingertips, and your body will move back toward an upright position, or vice versa. This is because force exerted from your hands and fingers can help to steer your centre of mass and keep you upright.

For a bird to lift off, it flaps its wings downwards and the force of the air being pushed down generates an equal and opposite force that pushes the bird up.

Birds fly in a ‘V’ shape formation because their relative position and wing flap timing give them extra lift from the upward motion of air created by the bird ahead of them.

Longer wings help bigger birds to soar for longer distances with little effort, because there is more wing surface area.

Train wheels are typically connected by fixed axle, which makes the wheels turn at the same speed. This is tricky when turning a corner, as one wheel has to cover more distance than the other wheel to which it is connected.

So how do trains stay on the track? The answer: geometry! 

Train wheels aren’t perfect cylinders. They’re beveled to make them wider on the inside of the wheel. This means that the wheels that have to travel a greater distance have a greater diameter so that everything stays aligned.

Trees make their own food, which they use to grow. 

Photosynthesis occurs when trees absorb sunlight and use that light energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates and oxygen. Photosynthesis occurs in cell organelles called chloroplasts. 

Chloroplasts contain chlorophyll, which is a green coloured pigment. Chlorophyll is found in all photosynthesising plants, and is the reason why leaves are green!

Lava lamps contain two substances that are immiscible (can’t mix with each other). This is why the blobs in the lamp stay separate to the liquid around them. 

This picture shows a home made lava lamp made with oil and water. Oil and water do not mix because they cannot form any chemical bonds with each other – the molecules are not attracted to each other. 

In fact, they are so incompatible water actively repels oil as you can see with the red ‘bubbles’ in the picture.

Mozzarella cheese is known for its stringy, delicious texture and its ability to stretch. Mozzarella has these characteristics because of how its proteins are arranged. 

Milk contains proteins, which are made up of lots of coiled-up chains of molecules. Cheese is made by heating milk which causes it to curdle, with the proteins separating to become curds. 

To make mozzarella, the curds are placed in hot, salty water which uncoils the proteins into long strands. After kneading and stretching, you wind up with stringy, stretchy mozzarella cheese.

Moving between monkey bars uses a movement called ‘brachiation’ (arm swinging), similar to that used by monkeys. 

Brachiation is like the movement of a pendulum: they both use gravity to accelerate the object that is swinging. This means it’s a pretty efficient way of moving – the swinging allows movement with only a small loss of mechanical energy. 

Humans have many of the physical features used by monkeys to swing: flexible shoulder joints and fingers that can grip.

The icecream we all enjoy is the result of years of experimentation with chemistry.

Icecream is a very complex and delicate substance that contains all three states of matter at once: solid (ice and fat), liquid (sugar solution), and gas (air bubbles).

Air makes up 30-50% of the total volume of icecream, which is why the volume of ice-cream drops when it melts.

You can experiment and make icecream at home using sugar, milk, ice, and salt! The salt lowers the freezing point of the ice so that the mixture changes from a liquid to a solid.

Knitting… it’s complicated. It engages both sides of the brain, and involves lots of counting, adding, and problem solving. It’s also a fabulous example of the practical use of mathematics and engineering.

For example, calculating stitch gauge involves multiplicative thinking, ratio, proportion, and estimation.

Knitted clothing is stretchy even though the wool is not because the yarn is interlaced in a network of loops (stitches). Therefore, because there is no single straight line of yarn anywhere, a knitted piece of fabric can be stretched in all directions.

Hot air balloons work using a very basic scientific principle: hot air is lighter than cool air – it has less mass per unit of volume. When hot air is injected into cooler air, the balloon rises.

To keep the balloon rising, you need a way to reheat the air. Hot air balloons do this with a burner positioned under an open balloon envelope.

Hot air balloons have no built in way to steer. They use the speed and direction of the wind to move. Pilots place the balloon at different altitudes to change direction.

What makes a trampoline bouncy? Energy! When you jump, potential energy from the springs is converted into kinetic energy from your movement which means you can jump higher than you can on flat ground.

The reason why adults get more tired than children on trampolines is because of Newton’s second law of motion which shows that it requires more force to move a heavier, larger object.

You can’t move until you begin jumping due to Newton’s first law (inertia), and pushing your feet down makes you go up (third law).

The sea’s high and low tides are due to the gravitational pull of the Sun and the Moon as well as the rotation of the Earth. Going to the beach is full of STEM: biology, physics, and astronomy to name a few!

On a rocky beach, when the water level drains out to sea, pools of seawater get trapped in between rocks called ‘tide pools’.

Tide pools are home for hardy creatures such as sea stars, mussels, and clams which can cope with a hard and constantly-changing environment – changes in water temperature, salinity, and oxygen.

Reading stimulates your brain; reduces stress; improves your vocabulary, memory, focus and concentration; and is also extremely useful. In our everyday lives, we read all the time!

Our brains don’t start out wired for reading. We are not born with the ability to read. To learn to read, we have to use parts of the brain that evolved to do other things.

There are many regions of the brain involved in reading. The temporal lobe helps us understand speech sounds and what words mean, the frontal lobe helps us pronounce speech sounds, and the angular and supramarginal gyrus help connect the different parts of the brain so we can recognise that the letters ‘c’, ’a’, and ‘t’ spell ‘cat’.

Jigsaw puzzles are terrific for learning spatial reasoning, improving hand-eye coordination, and developing fine motor skills.

Jigsaw puzzles use the left and right sides of the brain at the same time. Your left brain is more analytical, while your right brain uses intuition and creativity.

There are plenty of educational jigsaw puzzles available that can help kids (and adults!) learn about science, while also having the satisfaction of completing a challenging puzzle.

A simple machine is a mechanical device that changes the direction or strength of a force. Simple machines that are widely used include the wheel and axle, pulley, inclined plane, screw, wedge and lever.

While simple machines can make doing things feel easier by changing the combinations of force, speed, distance or direction to move something, they don’t change the overall amount of ‘work’ or effort to get something done.

Jimmy is enjoying playing with his cars and inclined plane toy, but in the real world, simple machines reduce effort or help people do things they normally couldn’t do.

Painting is fun, creative, and a great example of science in action! Paint is made of a pigment (which gives the paint its colour) and a binding agent (which changes depending on what kind of paint it is).

For example, oil paint is made by combining the pigment with an oil such as linseed, walnut, or safflower oil. When these oils absorb oxygen they convert from a liquid into a hard coating, allowing the paint to dry.

Some colours on famous painting from the early 1900s are fading because they were made with pigments that have slowly deteriorated over time.

House cats are all descended from giant cats – one giant cat to be specific: the North African/Southwest Asian wildcat. Today, around 71 different types of breeds of cats are recognised.

Cat coat patterns are a great way for scientists to distinguish between wild and domesticated cats. Looking at ancient cat DNA from all over the world shows that cats were first tamed around 9,500 years ago.

Cats purr by rattling their vocal cords together, as opposed to vibrating them, which is how humans use vocal cords. This is why cats can purr when they are breathing in and out.

There are many different parts of a fireworks show including coloured light, and noise.

The colour of a firework is determined by the heating of the metal salts in the firework. For example, strontium glows red, sodium burns orange and copper burns green.

The noise from the fireworks are a result of the rapid release of energy into the air, causing the air to expand faster than the speed of sound which produces a sonic boom shock wave.

Fireworks are also a great example of physics, engineering, creativity, technology, and more.

Beluga wales are white because their skin has adapted to their habitat in the Arctic. They are the only all-white whale species. However, beluga whales are actually born dark grey and it can take up to eight years for them to turn completely white.

Beluga whales are highly social, have a variety of facial expressions and make a wide range of vocal sounds.

Beluga whales don’t have dorsal fins which means less surface area for losing heat to the cold Arctic environment and allows a beluga to swim more easily under ice.

The radius of the Earth at the Equator is 6,378.137 kilometres. Radius is the distance from the middle of a circle to the edge and, in this case, from the middle of Earth to sea level.

Using this information and the laws of gravity, we can calculate that the mass of the Earth is 5.9724x10^24 kilograms.

We don’t calculate the weight of the Earth because weight measures how much gravity pulls down on an object.  So for example, your weight would be significantly less if you measured it on the Moon than on Earth.

A birds’ beak, sometimes called a bill, is made out of keratin, the same as our fingernails. A bill can be used for feeding, cleaning feathers, or for digging a nest hole.

The shape of a bird’s beak tells you what it eats. For example, a sparrow crushes seeds with its short thick beak while a robin catches insects with its short thin beak.

Bonus fact: Did you notice Hannah’s tongue sticking out? When a person sticks out there tongue as they concentrate, they temporarily stop communication between the tongue and the brain. This frees up brainpower for the task at hand.

When a soccer player kicks the ball off-centre, it causes the ball to spin.  The direction and speed of the spin determine how much the ball curves during flight. This is known as the “Magnus Effect”.

The spin of the ball causes the air around it to move, which then influences the direction in which the ball moves.

The Magnus Effect is a physics concept that helps athletes direct the ball using spin. It can be seen in lots of ball sports including tennis, golf, baseball, cricket and volleyball.

Lily loves slides, a wonderful example of #STEMEverywhere. As Lily slides down, gravity is pulling her downwards.

At the same time, friction is working against gravity to slow her descent.

Friction happens when two objects rub against each other, such as Lily’s bottom and the slide.

Did you know that swinging is a great example of #STEMEverywhere?

Swings work by converting potential energy into kinetic energy. Kinetic energy in physics is energy in motion.

If someone pushes you on a swing, that increases your kinetic energy and you go faster.

Kathleen and Orion are having fun whirling around, but did you know they are also showing STEM in action?

This video demonstrates the power of centripetal force. Centripetal force makes Orion travel in a circle around the centre of rotation (Kathleen).

The opposite of centripetal force is centrifugal force. Centrifugal force makes Orion feel like he is being pushed outwards and away from Kathleen.

Gravity is an invisible force that pulls objects towards each other. This video shows the power of gravity acting on the marble.

Did you know the force of gravity accelerates everything at the same rate, regardless of weight?

If you simultaneously dropped two marbles of the same size but different weights onto the track, they would finish at the same time.