Bottle Rockets with the 9th Graders!

Today was our Team's last day at the Middle School and last day working with the students. While a few of our members were away at PREDISAN, the remaining four of us got to launch rockets into the air! It was a lot of fun helping the 9th graders design and construct their own personal bottle rocket. They got very creative which was exactly what we wanted!

I should note that every time I introduced myself, "Me llamo Mitch", the students immediately started talking about one of the worst hurricanes that has ever hit Honduras which happened to be...Hurricane Mitch. There was even a movie named after it so nobody forgot my name after that.

After we introduced ourselves, I started off explaining the theory about how a bottle rocket works. I explained that we can easily apply an outside force to send the bottle into the air, whether it be throwing it, kicking it, or hitting it. However, I talked about how we would launch the bottles due to a force inside the bottle. I used a balloon as an example. As air is added to a balloon, the balloon expands. A plastic bottle on the other hand is not going to expand at all when air is added to it because of the material. I told the students that we were going to keep adding more and more air to the bottle using a bicycle pump without letting any air escape. I compared the air particles in the bottle to being in an overcrowded room. We as people like to have room to move around instead of being crammed together. Air particles work the same way so they are constantly looking for an exit from the bottle. Once the opening of the bottle is released, the air tries to escape so fast that it shoots downward, sending the bottle upward. However, I had to explain that just launching a bottle the way it looks to the eye would not go very high. That is because an empty bottle is way too light and is easily affected by the wind and air resistance. I then discussed how we would add water inside the bottle to give more weight and stability and add a tennis ball to the top in order to have a weight at the top to pull the rocket back down without wobbling. All of what I just described was what we were providing the students but they all got to design their own fins and assemble their rocket.

I explained how the rocket can still wobble a lot even if you add more mass but fins will help it fly in a straight line. When you launch a rocket with fins, the air resistance goes down the sides of the fins, allowing it to fly straight into the air with little curves. We drew many examples of fins on a white board and explained that 3 or 4 fins worked best but told them the pros and cons to each one. The students were split into groups of three and 2 and got very creative with their fin design and even decorated their rocket!

Once every rocket was finished, we went outside to a field behind the Middle School's Library to launch. One group at a time came out to our launch set up and we showed them what to do. One student would pump air into the bottle with the bike pump while another student would pull a rope to release the bottle. A third student would either help pull the rope or help pump air because the bike pump got very difficult for the students around 80 psi. We had to step in many times just to help them get to the 100 psi we decided to launch at. All the students laughed a lot whenever another student was struggling with the bike pump so it was awesome to see they were all having a really fun experience! The launches went really well! We took lots of pictures and videos and it was great seeing the students reactions each time a bottle took off! After each team launched once, we went back inside to the library, where we assembled the rockets, and discussed our equation for calculating height. I explained how gravity affects the rocket just like how it affects all of us each day. Gravity is a constant value and we used 9.81 m/s^2 for our equation. One of our leaders, Dr. Gwinn, manipulated some formulas to give us one formula to find the height, just using time and gravity. It was definitely a rough estimate but I think some values were pretty accurate. The rocket heights ranged from the lowest being 19 meters to the highest at 50 meters! The rockets were so popular that during the 20 minute recess, all the students in the elementary school came over to the middle school (A 3 minute walk) and watches us launch 3 rockets by ourselves during the break! They all loved watching it and looked so astonished! We even let one of their teachers pull the rope to launch our last rocket and they loved that even more! It was a very successful day and the students definitely had a great time. When we got back I was definitely sad that our time at the schools was over because it was a lot of fun and you could see on the students faces that they were happy we were there. I even got to play soccer with them the previous two days during the recess and those kids are quick! I managed to get one goal on Wednesday but many of those kids are a lot better at ball handling then I am. Those middle schoolers were almost breaking my ankles on that field!

Anyways, after we ate lunch we went out to a river very close to the ranch we are staying at and we were only there for 30 to 45 minutes. We were just taking pictures of the bank and assessing the site for a potential future bridge over the river. It is a very difficult river to build a bridge across due to flooding after straight days of rain as well as inconsistency in the heights of the banks on either side of the river. Hopefully, one can be built there in the future.

Overall it was a fantastic day and the staff hosted a devotional for the mission teams at HOI and even made us cake and gave us ice cream! They were all so loving and welcoming and definitely made our time there something I will never forget.