Teaching and Learning

Back to school for Me....
Many of the University buildings are very cool and very old.
Hello again. I have just returned from Otago University which is at the bottom of the South Island in a place called Dunedin. While I was there I went back to school for five days and became a student like all of you.  It was really hard work and by the end of each day my head hurt from all the thinking, listening and asking and answering questions. But it was also very interesting and I learnt how important (and challenging) it is to help people create and complete experiments like they are a real scientist. They showed us that with some encouragement and helping hand teachers, kids and their parents can think and work like scientists. 

This is the University's Executive Residence which is where I got to stay.











































Receiving my Executive Education Certificate from Kris Cooper and Professor Ross

When I come back to St Thomas More in Term 3 I am going to help the teachers and you the kids create some exciting science experiments. I have also been flying to Wellington and have observed and completed lots of fabulous experiments taught to us by some expert science teachers. Soon we will be able to do these together at our school. We have also been offered lots of exciting resources from the House of Science in Tauranga which will mean we can do even more experiments so we can have a better understanding of the wonderful world of science that surrounds us every day. These experiments are for everyone from the Juniors, up to the Middles and right on up to the Senior School. Let the fun begin!


Bottle Rockets
From the photos (see below) you can see there are some parts I will need to purchase but hopefully I can use mostly recycled materials for most things. My design may be a little different as Ben Jackson who is completing his PhD at TiDA explained how I can make a trigger mechanism for the launch pad. If this works we can launch the bottle rocket when we feel we have pumped enough pressure inside the bottle rocket and not before. I am hoping this is going to work.

If it does cost a lot of money to create exciting experiments like this one then schools will find it very difficult to do these type of experiments regularly. We want to be able to do experiments in many different ways, using different types of equipment so we can experiment with and learn about many different kinds of scientific ideas. 


I have included a short movie of one of the bottle rockets that I made so we could use them in  a couple of teaching lessons at school. I wanted the students to fire off the rockets lots of times and measure and record the distances the bottle rockets traveled. I made the launcher so you could change the angle of the launch pad. The students experimented with these changes as well as increasing and reducing the amount of water they poured into the bottle. They needed to record the amount of milliliters of water they poured into the bottle as well. 

They then looked at all the evidence they had gathered and decided together what was the best angle to fire the rocket and what was the right amount of water in the bottle to create the most successful launch. Thank you again to those six students at school who helped me out with this investigation. 

I then repeated the whole experiment three times in Wellington but this time it was completed by the teachers I am working with. They got to fire the rockets for 20 minutes and recorded all their data so they could work out what they thought was the best angle and water combination. Here is a short video of one of the launches as school. 


Interestingly all three groups worked through the firing phase in different ways but all three came up with similar combinations of launch angle and amounts of water in the bottles. Incredibly these combinations were very similar to the ones the students had discovered at school. So very well done everybody! 


If you want to make a bottle rocket like the one I made you can use this plan. I hope it is helpful.





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