If you see me in front of an in-person class and I have a meter-stick, you’ll often witness me trying to balance it in various ways. The most impressive and kind of magical way to balance a ruler, stick, baseball bat, etc., is using this trick of sliding your fingers towards one another. They naturally meet up at the exact balance point, even when the object is lopsided. Take a look:

I also like this video because it shows me messing up and dropping stuff, and there’s a great cameo of our puppy, Nina. Oh, and the intro and outro features my favorite band.

What other objects can you balance? Can you create an investigation around finding the balance point of an object under different conditions? How would that point shift if I kept adding weights to one end or another, or to a different spot? What other strangely shaped objects would balance this way?