Since February, the eighth-grade students have been learning about physics in Science class. To start, they’ve learned about the forces on our planet: gravity, air resistance, friction, and centripetal force. They have also been thinking about Isaac Newton’s Three Laws of Motion, and working on ways to put those laws into real-life scenarios.
For example, eighth graders were tasked with creating a rocket that could fight air resistance and gravity, and that could exhibit all of Newton’s three laws. They started by designing paper airplanes, to learn how different designs could create different amounts of drag. Then, they graduated to rockets.
Working in pairs, students designed different wings and types of cones for the tops of their rockets, with the goal of building a rocket that could not only defy gravity, but also fly the highest out of the whole class.
All of their hard work culminated in an epic rocket launch in the parking lot across the street from the school. Students used an altimeter to measure the height of their rocket as it blasted into the air; while all the rockets reached great heights, one design made it an astonishing 40 meters–approximately 131 feet–in the sky!
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