Pressure, Pressure Everywhere: Using raps and hands-on activities to teach about air pressure

Journal Article | January 1999

The activities in this article show how combining rap music with hands-on activities provides a valuable way to teach the concept of air pressure. It also allows a connection to content learning with students' everyday…

Water Pressure in Depth

Journal Article | February 2011

An obvious lesson means far-from-enthusiastic students. By adding a second variable, this water pressure and depth investigation provides students with a problem to solve and identify. With two variables, students had…

Straws and Air Pressure: Using An Everyday Object to Explain Air Pressure

Journal Article | March 2014

Use straws and other inexpensive items to explore concepts related to air pressure.

Tried and True: Wind and pressure

Journal Article | December 2002

The wind is part of our daily lives, but not everyone can explain what causes this phenomenon. To demonstrate how differences in pressure systems cause air to move from one area to another, the classic collapsing-can…

Science Sampler: An introduction to water pressure

Journal Article | June 2009

The difficulty in teaching about water pressure is how to represent differences in water pressure, changes that are not visible to the human eye. One way is to manipulate containers of water and to observe the flow of…

Under Pressure: Activities with a vacuum pump (and some marshmallows) help students learn about pressure

Journal Article | January 2002

What would happen if a person went into space without a spacesuit? Before learning the answer students must first understand the forces—gravity and atmospheric pressure. This article describes various demonstrations…

Focus on Physics: The Ever-Present Atmospheric Pressure

Journal Article | September 2017

This column helps teachers build an understanding of physical principles. In this issue atmospheric pressure is explained.