Stacked Books

The purpose of this project was to explore the concept of the center of mass.

The goal of this project was to stack books together to achieve the maximum overhang from the edge of the table.

The project was girls vs. boys. Who could build a structure on the edge of a table that had the maximum overhang the fastest?

When doing this project, I discovered that by moving only one book to an incorrect position, everything else would fail as well. All the books depend on eachother. Even if it seems that the book being moved will not cause a lot of damage, it will.

The center of mass is the point where all the mass mass of the object is concentrated.

This activity relates to the concept of center of mass because in order to stack the books, the center of mass of each of the books had to be known.