Back to school for Me....
Many of the University buildings are very cool and very old. |
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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