Sunday, March 15, 2009

Middle Schoolers Love Rockets


Middle school students and teachers found rockets just as useful for experimental design.
Over the past two weeks my colleague at ISM, Cory, used our school’s rocket launchers to teach experimental design. They did much the same activity that my school students did earlier in the year.
They differed slightly in that they did not use sand bags to drop on the launcher, and thus compress the bottle. That can be a bit tedious, so instead they had students attempt to control the variable of force by stepping off a chair of a constant height onto the bottle. It seemed to work pretty well.

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