Product Review:
Zero Toys’ Zero
Launcher
by Mitchell Levine
Common sense tells us that students
find physics boring, dry, and difficult. Labs are tedious.
Equations are excruciating. Newton’s laws might as well be in the Principia Mathematica’s
original Latin for all that today’s high school Regents
students care. Yet not only is this material required for standards
completion and achievements, it’s so crucial to everyday
practical matters that incomprehension can actually lead to
physical injury. What can a science teacher do to make this
stuff interesting?
Actually, all that’s needed is an approximately fifteen
dollar investment in one of the most fascinating and inexpensive
science demonstration aids that this reviewer’s ever
seen, the amazing Zero Launcher by Zero Toys. Think aerodynamics,
fluid and statistical mechanics, torsion, and classical dynamics
are too complicated for your sixth graders? Wrong! With this
bargain-priced plastic unit, your class will not only receive
a vivid demonstration of all of the above principles in action,
but additionally experience the joy that comes only with the
ability to blow six inch strawberry scented, kosher (that’s
right, kosher) glycerin-based toroidal smoke rings up to fourteen
feet from a handheld plastic unit.
The product uses a simple
hand-triggered mechanism that looks much like a water pistol
to create a vortex of non-toxic fog based on a physical law
called the Bernoulli effect. With just 2 AA batteries and a
little bit of practice, anyone can create endless and transfixing
instances in miniature of the same phenomenon that drives volcanoes,
tornadoes, and whirlpools. How much fun is this to watch?
An Education Update staff member, actually wore out the batteries
on the very first day we unleashed this monster on the office.
Luckily, one small bottle of Superfog included with the product
can produce 25,000 smoke rings! As a onetime physics major
myself, I can personally say that the Zero Launcher is among
the very best visual demonstration aids I’ve ever seen!
For info or orders: www.zerotoys.com.
