With a word like “rocket” in the title, you know you are going to have a great time! First, I needed a Kool-Aid bottle and I needed to drink some Kool-Aid. I hadn’t had Kool-Aid in years, having it again was not exactly yummy.
No offense to all of the little guys out there, I thought it tasted like cough medicine (YUCK!). But I know every little kid would enjoy it as the treat it is. My brother drank the rest for me(Yay!).
I had grabbed two straws, one bigger than the other. I took the smaller straw and stuck it into the Kool-Aid bottle. Taking some modeling clay, I squeezed a little bit around the lip of the bottle and around the straw for a good seal and a little bit of support.
I took the bigger straw and pushed one of the ends into some clay to plug it up.
For safety reasons, I shoved a piece of Styrofoam on that same end.
Now all I had to do was slip the bigger straw over the smaller one and my rocket was ready to go.
Yes! I get to launch a rocket!
All we have to do is point it away from any living being and squeeze the bottle!
I took my stance and squeezed the bottle really fast and PHOOH! It went across the hall!! Take a look.
It went far for a little straw! It was so much fun! I did it again and again. Who wouldn’t?
I did something similar with some kids at Explora. The kids made and decorated their own straw and put it on a devise. It was basically a bike-tire foot pump with a medal tube attached to it. They slipped the straw onto the tube and stomped on the lever to send the straw flying across the playground. TONS of fun for everyone! What was really cool was we took this devise to the New Mexico State Fair on Science and Technology Day and hundreds of kids got to experience this along with other Explora activities! I had so much fun.
Anyway, the big question of every experiment.. How? Well, this one is almost self explanatory. It involves Newton’s Third Law of Motion. “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. The straw stays in place until the bottle is squeezed. The action is the air in the bottle rushing out of the smaller straw then hitting the clay plug at the end. The reaction is the straw launching from the force of the air.
The WOW-rating for this one is 4. Just under a “Let’s do it again”.
We have one more experiment in this chapter of “Air-mazing”. I will not reveal the name of the next chapter yet, but I can tell you that it will get messy!
