Water Rockets
October 19, 2006
Yesterday, The Wife and I were running errands when we noticed a class of middle schoolers standing in a field near our house. The teacher was fiddling with a 2-liter soda bottle equipped with fins: a class-built water rocket. We watched as they filled it up, pumped it up, and with a cheer, launched it into the sky. It was great — an inexpensive, interactive, and exciting demonstration of physics at work. Instead of falling asleep over a book, these kids were screaming about the joys of Newton’s Third Law.
Now that’s education.
October 20, 2006 at 4:18 am
I agree that this is a fantastic way of teaching kids some of the less accessible subjects such as Physics, Chemistry, Maths etc. I did my secondary school in the former Soviet Union, where education not only has a strong quantitative emphasis, but teachers seek to stuff as much information about maths/physics/chemistry as possible rather than pausing for a second to ask themselves just how much of it you’re ever going to apply in your life.
As you can imagine, such schools were hardly the stellar examples of fun-filled education, so it’s great to see at least some teachers realizing the simple fact that a student is likely to learn a lot more (and have a lot more incentive to apply themselves) if they actually enjoy the process of doing so.