Teaching Universal Gravitation with Vector Games

Like many high school and college physics teachers, I have found playing vector games to be a useful way of illustrating the concepts of inertia, velocity, and acceleration. Like many, I have also had difficulty in trying to get students to understand Newton's law of universal gravitation, specifically the inverse-square law and its application to motion. In this paper, I'll outline a way to address this problem through use of a vector game. The inspiration for this idea came from a January 1998 article in The Physics Teacher by Michael Vinson entitled “Space Race: A Game of Physics Adventure.”¹