The well known classic game of Angry Birds by Rovio is both used for general entertainment whilst also often being used as a 'fun' way to learn specific branches of physics, such as projectile motion, or simply laws of mechanics.

But the problem with the educational use is that the angry bird physics are incorrect, leading to children learning 'how things move' incorrectly.

Newton's first law, the law of inertia, states that "an object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at a constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force". An example of this would be that if you were sitting in a train travelling at 20m/s, and you dropped a stone out of the window. From the point of view of someone standing sationary on the embankment at the time, they would see the stone fall to the ground with a path shaped like a parabola. This is because according to the law of inertia, once dropped, the stone will continue to travel at a speed of 20m/s forwards until air resistance acts as the unbalanced force, slowing down the stone. Finally, gravity will cause the stone to fall down as time passes. Overall, this shows that the stone falls to the ground with the path of  parabola relative to the embankment.

 A similar scenario is also found in Angry Birds. When the chicken, named 'Matilda', flies through the air and drops the egg, you would expect the egg to have a parabola shaped path to the ground. Instead, in the game, the egg drops vertically downwards, breaking the laws of physics.

The aim of this petition is to try to convince Rovio to update this basic flaw in the game, to give children a better understanding on how the basic building blocks of reality work. An error like this could cause children to misunderstand the basic Newtonian laws of physics overall, leading to a lack of simple knowledge regarding the laws of motion. I personally think that an error like this shows signs of almost saying that physics does not matter.

Thank you,

Ishaan Dimri