Science Saturday: Stomp Rockets Revisited

Stomp rockets was one of the more successful Science Saturdays last year, so I thought it would be fun to revisit again this year. We had a few repeat visitors who wanted to do stomp rockets again, but we also had a lot of fun with new friends!

We had 4 store bought stomp rockets (affiliate link) set up for immediate action/reaction gratification. Basically the harder you jumped, the higher/further the rocket flew!

I also set up targets using our space cutouts from our Straw Rocket lesson we also did at last year's event.

Then for those who wanted the extra challenge, we made our own stomp rockets which we launched via the homemade stomp rocket launcher (the directions on how to build the stomp rocket launcher and rockets to fly off of them are found on that link). In short, for the rockets, you roll a piece of construction paper around a pipe of the same size as your launcher. You want it to be tight enough so you don't lose air through the paper gaps, but you also want it to be loose enough to come off of the launcher when you stomp. To close off the paper tube, you want to make a nose cone. I found the easiest way was to fold the corners down and tape it to make a triangle. Then you add wings.

Here's my sample rocket:

We had some interesting wing designs. This one started with cylinder wings:

We had a few request for heart shaped wings, so we tried half hearts:

The paper rockets can fly high! J almost made a basket with his orange rocket using our homemade launcher.

The plastic rockets fly very high and work very well but they are not durable. I'm disappointed in the quality of the plastic rockets that come with the set. I'd like to replace them, but it is actually cheaper to buy whole new sets! It just seems so wasteful. The homemade rockets also launched ok from the store bought launchers. They were a little big since the store bought launcher tube is smaller than the homemade one. We'll have to find something smaller to use to roll the paper rocket if we go solely into paper rocket territory after the plastic ones get too beaten up.

Thanks for all those who spent this beautiful Saturday morning with us. I look forward to the next Science Saturday. We're tentatively thinking the morning of July 13th if you are looking to save the date. If you want more specific details, feel free to email me using the address on the sidebar to the left (<<), and I'll add you to the email list.