The video analysis of a fidget spinner flight: torque and angular momentum

Abstract Could the world-famous fidget spinner toy be used in the classroom to illustrate the concepts of moment of inertia, torque and angular momentum? Curiously, there are very few papers related to the topic that have been published so far. In this work, we present a real situation consisting of two extremely simple experimental configurations of oblique launching of a spinner with and without initial spin type rotation. We define spin type rotation as any rotation in which the spinner rotates around one of its main symmetry axes. The technique chosen for data collection was the video analysis, using the free software Tracker. The main results were (i) To present a fast and easy execution experiment that simultaneously approaches the concepts of torque, orbital angular momentum and spin angular momentum. (ii) Analyze in a qualitative way the similarities and differences between the orientations of the orbital and spin angular momenta for two types of oblique launching (iii) Obtain a quantitative estimative of the magnitudes of the spin angular momenta in relation to the respective symmetry axis of the spinner, in both cases.