What is Unbalanced Force - More Grades 3-5 Science on Harmony Square

This live-action video program is about the term unbalanced Force. The program is designed to reinforce and support a student's comprehension and retention of the term unbalanced Force through use of video footage, photographs, diagrams and colorful, animated graphics and labels.

Viewers will see and hear the term unbalanced Force used in a variety of contexts providing students with a model for how to appropriately use the word. Related words are also used and reinforced with visuals and text.

An unbalanced force is a force that changes the position, speed or direction of the object to which it is applied. The unbalanced force accelerates the object with the acceleration directly proportional to the size of the force and inversely proportional to the mass of the object.

A system has a net force when an unbalanced force is exerted on it, in other words the sum of all forces is not zero. Acceleration and net force always exist together.

Any push or pull is a force. To describe a force, you must know two things. You must know the size of the force and the direction of the force. Suppose two teams are playing tug of war. Each team is pulling with equal force, but in opposite directions. Neither team can make the other team move. Forces that are equal in size but opposite in direction are called balanced forces.

Balanced forces do not cause a change in motion. When balanced forces act on an object at rest, the object will not move. If you push against a wall, the wall pushes back with an equal but opposite force. Neither you nor the wall will move. Forces that cause a change in the motion of an object are unbalanced forces.

In physics, tension may be described as the pulling force transmitted axially by the means of a string, a cable, chain, or similar one-dimensional continuous object, or by each end of a rod, truss member, or similar three-dimensional object; tension might also be described as the action-reaction pair of forces acting at each end of said elements. Tension could be the opposite of compression.

At the atomic level, when atoms or molecules are pulled apart from each other and gain potential energy with a restoring force still existing, the restoring force might create what is also called tension. Each end of a string or rod under such tension could pull on the object it is attached to, in order to restore the string/rod to its relaxed length.

Unbalanced forces are not equal and opposite. Suppose that one of the teams in tug of war pulls harder than the other team. The forces would no longer be equal. One team would be able to pull the other team in the direction of the larger force.

In physics, tension, as a transmitted force, as an action-reaction pair of forces, or as a restoring force, may be a force and has the units of force measured in newtons (or sometimes pounds-force). The ends of a string or other object transmitting tension will exert forces on the objects to which the string or rod is connected, in the direction of the string at the point of attachment. These forces due to tension are also called "passive forces". There are two basic possibilities for systems of objects held by strings: either acceleration is zero and the system is therefore in equilibrium, or there is acceleration, and therefore a net force is present in the system.