This exciting, hands-on workshop encourages both creativity and scientific thinking. We’ll start with a discussion of air power, which is adapted to your class to ensure that it is age appropriate. Your children will then work in pairs or small groups to design and decorate large plastic bottles which can be safely launched on a playground ‘race track’ outside, using water and compressed air.

Focussing on the Working Scientifically skills of asking questions, observing and drawing conclusions, there’ll be plenty of opportunities for focussed talk as your children decide to include or discard nose cones, streamers or fins.  Working in pairs or groups facilitates this discussion, as children have to negotiate with their peers and justify their thoughts.

Once the rocket cars are completed, we’ll launch them outside, with groups able to ‘race’ their cars against each other, depending on the age and strength of the launching children! We’ll finish the workshop by looking for patterns in our results and reflecting on possible reasons for these patterns before asking your children to come up with further ideas for future testing.

This workshop requires both indoor classroom space and an outdoor space with a hard, flat surface such as a playground.  If your outdoor space is larger, you may be interested in our Water Rockets workshop, which can run in an unsurfaced or undulating area.

Documents:

• Risk Assessment for Rocket Cars

Contact our schools team with any questions on [email protected].