Welcome back to day 5 of Camp Liftoff, so much progress has been made on our competition rockets! Still very possible that each and every rocket can be launched soon. Unfortunately, Tim, the coach has left the camp to see his family, but now we have Sky Li! Sky is going to become a sophomore in the 2025-2026 school year, and can provide valuable insight to each and everyone of the students.
Part 1
We started with a pop quiz on all the parts of a rocket, we make sure to do this everyday so each student can remember what they learned. If you want, you can refer to the old posts on each part of the rocket (day 3).
We next had our physics coach, Sinja, help the students review Newtons laws of motion which can be referred to in a previous post (day 3). Sinja than taught the students a new concept “kinematics,” which is about the speed and directions of things.
- Velocity (scalar) and Speed (vector).
- Distance: how much ground you’ve covered.
- Displacement: how far you are from where you started.
- Acceleration: how fast an object’s speed changes.
After some practice questions, the students did a Blooket, where each player competes against each other by answering physics questions.
We next chose to work on the motor mounts by epoxying them into the tubes, it requires a lot of coordination. Which took some time, leading to pushing back breaktime.
Breaktime!
While the coaches cleaned up, the students played some more capture the flag, but this time, you could throw the flag to a teamate.
Part 2
After a fun break, the students not had to epoxy the fins, this entire process took up about 45 minutes but the results were all impressive. By placing tape on the tubes, the students were able to create “fillets” by spreading epoxy on the tube and fins. The tape keep the epoxy from spreading too much and causing a mess.
