[Teacher voiceover]

This is 6th grade earth science and one of the things we do in earth science of course to study Earth’s place in the universe, so we study space. I like to culminate that unit with the study of rockets.

NASA has put together a wonderful program which takes a couple of weeks to do, where the students form these companies and they have to come up with an idea of a rocket, and build rockets with a specific type of material. They bring all these materials in: 2 liter water bottles, soda cans, paper for nose cones, and cardboard. Each group of kids (or each company that they form) is given a million dollars to spend. The object is to spend the least amount of money on materials to build a rocket that will go the highest.

[Student 1 speaking]
The winner gets “10 million dollars”, second place gets “5 million dollars”, and third place gets “3 million dollars.”

The idea of course is to get them interested in rockets, which is the catch of this program. But along the way they’re learning how to write checks, they’re learning how to work in groups, they’re learning how to manage, and they’re learning how to delegate work to people who have more expertise in some areas of the project than others.

We bring weather into this because obviously today is a windy day; you can tell by my hair being blown. They have to decide if they want to angle their launch into the wind. To help them out NASA has put a great rocket simulator together where they can go in and type in all of their parameters for the rocket; the length of the rocket, the weight of the rocket, the the width, even the thrust that they’re going to have. And the simulator will give them an idea of how high it will go, and also how accurate it will be when it’s coming in on its landing.

[Student 1 speaking]

The rocket simulator was really really close to this rocket

[Student 2 speaking]

You just enter the measurements, and you can do the materials and then it just simulates a launch at you can set the angle and set the wind speed.

[Teacher voiceover]

As you can see, the kids are really interested in this. It’s a lot of fun. They don’t want it to stop. It always gives me ideas that that hands-on type of science, even with earth science, is the way to go. It keeps their interests and they’re more willing to learn. And sometimes they’re learning things and they’re not even aware that they’re learning. But it’s been fun for me, and I think that’s another key. If it’s fun for the teacher, it’s going to be fun for the kids.