Page School 6th Grade Rocketry 2024; Goodbye Mr. B.

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Published: Friday, 07 June 2024 06:26

Written by Claude Maina

In many ways, this was a normal Rocketry Unit at the Page School. This was our 15th year and we have had so much experience with the program now, that much of it has now become routine. And by 'routine', I don't mean boring or blah, but in the sense that many tasks have worked their way into muscle memory and get done almost without thinking about it.

The class size this year was again 40 students, with the same two homerooms taught by John Benvenuti and Trina Forrest. John's homeroom built the Thing-a-ma-jig and Trina's built the same tube fin rocket prepared for us by FlisKits as we used last year. The tube fin kit is essentially a Razor clone; goes together very easily and flies well. It hasn't made it into the FlisKits catalog yet. Although Ray DiPaola promises me that it will soon.

We always start the unit with a prebuild session. The prebuild session is where a few students stay after school and help assemble parachutes, streamers, motor packets, fill glue bottles, prep each kit for the build session, and decorate the room with rocketry pictures and some of my rockets that I bring in. These students volunteer, and so are usually the better students in the class. So, the session usually goes pretty well, and so it did this year.

As usual for the build, I demonstrate how various parts go together - the 'dry-fit', with the kids just watching. The kids then do the same dry-fit and if all parts fit together nicely, we follow it with glue. In the middle of build session, we stop to allow the glue to set on the parts that were constructed so far, and I give a short lesson in rocketry, triangulation, some basic physics and show a few rocketry Youtube videos. We had about two hours this year for the build which was enough time for both. Nothing surprising happened and both rockets went together very well.