31 March 2015
Massimiliano Allegri and Simone Padoin were both in attendance during this morning’s ‘I ragazzi delle elementari incontrano la grande scienza’ workshop at the National Automobile Museum in Turin.
The fifth edition of the meeting, which is organised by the Giovanni Agnelli Foundation, CentroScienza Onlus association and the Regional Education Office of Piedmont, also saw 400 students from primary schools around the city present.
Through a series of free-kicks, Allegri and Padoin showed the onwatching crowd how the ‘Magnus effect’, the observation where a spinning ball curves from its main flight path, works.
Then following a greeting by Exor and FIAT president John Elkann, the children were divided into groups where they took part in races with compressed air-driven cars built from balloons and recycled materials.
Today’s experiments, which evoked the workshop’s primary focus of encouraging youngsters on the importance of physics, also taught the students about air resistance and curvilinear trajectories.
