Everyday Physics: How Things Move
Discover the invisible rules governing everything from sudden car stops to dropping your phone. Learn to predict how objects accelerate, collide, and trade energy without memorizing complex math formulas.
Like Duolingo, but for Everyday Physics: How Things Move. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 11 levels across 2 sections, about 22 minutes end to end, roughly 4 days at five minutes a day. It moves through How Objects Move and Stop and Energy, Pushes, and Collisions. It starts from scratch.
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Key ideas in Everyday Physics: How Things Move
- An object in motion maintains its speed and direction unless an outside push or pull acts on it
- Engines are only needed to change motion, not to keep motion going when there is no resistance
- In deep space, there is virtually no air or gravity to provide an unbalanced stopping force
- Mass measures an object's inertia, or how stubbornly it resists speeding up, slowing down, or turning
- More massive objects require a much larger push or pull to alter their path than lighter objects
- Changing direction is a change in motion, which mass actively resists
- When a car brakes, friction slows the car itself, but loose objects inside continue moving forward at their original speed
- Coffee sloshes forward because no force acted directly on it to slow it down at the same rate as the car
- Seatbelts and lids provide the external stopping push needed to decelerate passengers and liquids along with the vehicle
- Momentum depends on both mass and speed multiplied together
- A slow object can still possess immense momentum if it has enormous mass
- An object with zero speed has zero momentum, no matter how heavy it is
- Friction is an external contact force exerted between two surfaces rubbing together, not an internal drain on motion
- Rough microscopic textures grab each other and push directly against the direction of sliding
- Minimizing surface contact bumps reduces the opposing force, letting objects slide much longer
- In a vacuum with no air resistance, all objects accelerate downward at the same rate regardless of their mass
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Everyday Physics: How Things Move the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
When there is no air or friction pushing back on a probe, why would it fire its engine?
Get it right to open this lesson and 10 more in the app.
Where Everyday Physics: How Things Move takes you
- 1
How Objects Move and Stop
- Inertia: Why Things Keep Doing What They Are Doing
- Gravity and Falling: Separating Weight from Speed
- 2
Energy, Pushes, and Collisions
- Energy Exchange: Kinetic, Potential, and Heat
- Action, Reaction, and Surviving Impacts
2 sections · 4 units · 11 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
Tomo is in ChatGPT
Tomo is also a ChatGPT plugin: the same playable courses, built and played inside your chat.
Add Tomo to ChatGPT- What to ask
- “Make me a Tomo course on black holes.” “Turn this chat into a Tomo course.”
- What you get
- Quick questions with instant feedback, hearts and stars, ready to play in about a minute.
- Where it goes
- No sign-up to start. Connect your Tomo account and your streak carries on in the app.
You pick the voice
Everyday Physics: How Things Move is taught in the Bestie style: your friend who just gets it. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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Start Everyday Physics: How Things Move today.
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