Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Starting Off Makers Club with Water Bottle Rocket Launches

Today was the first day of our after-school “Maker’s Club.” Over the weekend I had to make selections from 55 applications, and it was REALLY hard. I decided to have 2 different six week sessions this semester, and originally planned to accept 15 students per session. Last year I accepted 30 students, and that was too many at one time. For a couple reasons, I took 16 students per session, so 32 students were pretty excited yesterday to receive acceptance letters and 23 students were not. I’m going to give priority to the 23 students who applied and were not accepted in January, however, when students can apply for Spring Maker’s Club sessions.

Water Bottle Rocket Launch Time at Maker by Wesley Fryer, on Flickr
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License   by  Wesley Fryer 

Last spring I facilitated a STEM unit on “Water Bottle Rockets” for my 4th and 5th graders, and this coming Saturday (at EdCamp Stillwater) I’ll be finally returning the Pitsco launcher which I borrowed from 8th grade science teacher Lisa Seay at EdCamp Tulsa in March. Since I still have the launcher and our days are still warm, I decided we’d build or reconfigure leftover water bottle rockets from last spring and launch them for our first day of Maker’s Club today. It was a lot of fun and I think the kids enjoyed it. Here’s a video of our launches, shot in 60 fps slow motion with my iPhone 5S. I combined the videos in iMovie on the iPhone, exported it to the iPhone camera roll, and then uploaded it with the YouTube Capture app (free) using provided copyright-friendly music. Next week I think students will work in our new Maker Studio!


Posted

in

,

by

Comments

One response to “Starting Off Makers Club with Water Bottle Rocket Launches”