Rocket power!
Last week our eldest daughter had a great assignment from school - to make a water-powered rocket carry an egg into the sky and parachute it down safely to the ground.
Well...she took to it like a real pro - building and testing the parachute, chucking it out of the bedroom window until she had it just right. The silver spray-paint job she did on the Coke-bottle rocket was great.
Getting the parachute to open at the right time was a challenge - we finally figured out a crafty spring-loaded mechanism inside the nose-cone coupled with a tightly-rolled parachute seemed to do the trick.
Launch day arrived...10...9...8... She came home from school with a big grin...out of 19 rockets launched that day, only 2 parachuted the eggs safely home - hers being one of them!
Cool!
(Sorry, just had to tell ya!)
posted by mcrilf @ 9:04 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Hi, Stephjmort from the CP message board here.
This post reminds me of the one we had when I was a kid. The egg thing is a common theme with math teachers.
We had to create a device using only drinking straws, that would cradle an egg sufficiently as to throw it out the window, and have it land without breaking.
We were partnered with another, I was lucky to have my best friend as my partner.
At the end of the day. Mine, and only one other project in the whole school succeeded.
What's the secret? Macdonald'd drinking straws are a bit wider than common ones (or they used to be). I used them to make the corners of my device, slipping the narrower ones inside them. It made for a very strong star shaped device. Inside was an egg cradle, that was attached to the outer strucure at both ends, to separate the egg from the device itself (to keep it from rattling around in there).
Years later.... build a kite that flies.... yep, we did great on that one too. And I am sure your daughter will too.
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