gyroscope

So I caved and bought a gyroscope today. (For one dollar more than I could have bought it yesterday at OMSI, I might add. But who's counting. I am open to irony these days.) It seemed like a good omen, too, having seen it twice in two days {after learning about them yesterday}. Plus! I was seduced by visions of gyroscopic? tricks and hours (minutes?) of thrilling science fun. And- Samuel can be very persuasive.

On the instructions that came with the gyroscope, there are pictures on the back (the advanced tricks...) of the gyroscope resting on a pencil tip or spinning on a piece of string like a tight rope spinner. I knew those tricks would take a little time and expected a bit of a learning curve for us to get to that point. I didn't, however, expect us to not be able to get it to spin on the little stand it came with- a little black stand made just for gyroscope spinning. Who knew? But- after getting it to spin several times, we still have yet to be able to keep it standing on it's little stand, much less our finger tips. I am planning on leaving it on the table for a few days so everyone can have a chance to fiddle around with it a little more and {possibly} master the art of getting our gyroscope to stand upright. We shall see.

Here is a five minute video about the gyroscope. Our gyroscope does not yet do any of the tricks in this video. It does, however, do the part about dropping and falling over {so far}.