How Everyday Mechanisms Work
See the hidden engineering inside the everyday tools and machines around you. Learn how simple components like levers, threads, pulleys, and linkages trade distance for force to make impossible tasks effortless.
Like Duolingo, but for How Everyday Mechanisms Work. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 12 levels across 2 sections, about 24 minutes end to end, roughly 5 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Gaining Leverage: Multiplying Force in Handheld Tools and Routing Power: Transmitting and Converting Motion. It starts from scratch.
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Key ideas in How Everyday Mechanisms Work
- The fulcrum is the pivot point a lever turns around
- A lever cannot create free energy; to multiply force, you must push your hand through a much longer distance
- The heavy load only moves a small distance while the handle travels a wide arc
- Placing the fulcrum close to the load creates a long handle and short working end, giving the highest force multiplication
- First-class levers like crowbars balance effort and load on opposite sides of a central pivot
- Second-class levers like nutcrackers trap the load between the hinge and your grip for pure crushing power
- Third-class levers like tweezers put the effort between the pivot and the tip, sacrificing force to gain precision
- Bending stress builds up along the lever arm and peaks directly at the fulcrum
- Tool handles taper down toward the grip because the bending load is lowest where your hands push
- A flexible lever flexes under load, wasting input motion instead of driving the working tip
- Stiff, rigid materials transfer hand movement immediately into output force without spongy travel loss
- A wedge is an inclined plane that moves through an object
- Driving a wedge forward along its length forces opposing surfaces outward at right angles to the stroke
- A shallow, moving slope trades a long driving distance for immense lateral splitting force
- A screw thread is a continuous ramp wrapped spirally around a shaft
- Turning the shaft moves the ramp, trading many small circular turns for powerful forward thrust
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 How Everyday Mechanisms Work 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.
You use a long pry bar to lift a heavy rock. Why can't the tool give you extra force without a trade-off?
Get it right to open this lesson and 11 more in the app.
Where How Everyday Mechanisms Work takes you
- 1
Gaining Leverage: Multiplying Force in Handheld Tools
- Levers: Trading Distance for Pure Force
- Wedges and Screws: Folding Slopes into Compact Spaces
- 2
Routing Power: Transmitting and Converting Motion
- Pulleys and Cables: Hoisting and Redirecting Loads
- Gears and Linkages: Shaping How Parts Travel
2 sections · 4 units · 12 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
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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
How Everyday Mechanisms Work 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 How Everyday Mechanisms Work today.
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