Final Rocketry Reflection

While doing rocketry I learned a lot. One thing I learned is the engineering design process. Ask, imagine, plan, create, improve. First you have to ask yourself what, why, and how. Then I learned that you can’t just start building you have to brainstorm and imagine what you want it to look like. Then plan your design and start building. After we launched we did the same process but we knew what went wrong so we could improve! The engineering design process is a very important process to do when building your rocket and it definitely helped me. 

I also learned about rockets, thrust, drag, lift, all the stuff you need to know to understand a launch of a rocket. Thrust is the amount of push a rocket engine provides to the rocket. Drag is an aerodynamic resistance to the motion of the object. Lift is a side force used to stabilize and control the direction of flight. 

One important thing I also improved about is teamwork, you don’t always get your way and that’s how it is. Because my team argued a lot I learned a lot from it and it reflected on me in a good way. Not every team is perfect I learned, even though my friend was on my team. 

My favorite thing in the unit was building our rocket and practicing our rocketry presentation. While practicing our presentation I thought it was really fun. It was very entertaining too to practice. Though I spent a lot of time practicing, I still enjoyed it. I thought building our rocket was fun because doing the measurements of where the fins would be, making the nose cone, and hot gluing was super fun!

In all I think the rocketry unit was a blast and I would totally do it again if we could, but maybe a little switch up for the teams because my team argued a lot but otherwise it was a super cool experience!

Designing and Building and Launching Rocket #3

In rocketry we are currently building our third rocket. My team has almost finished and we are so excited for the third launch because our parents are coming.

First we designed the rocket, it took longer than expected because we were very slow and didn’t agree much. What we did was copy and pasted our second rocket and then we changed the color and nose cone because we decided the thing we were changing was the nose cone. 

Another team had a pointy tall nose cone and that’s what we wanted so we did what they did. They stacked two nose cones on top of each other. One small and one that actually fit the rocket. Then I taped them separately with black tape, to make them bigger because when I taped them together it was bigger because they already had tape on them. So I taped them with black tape nice and tight. For our rocket body it was the same, skinny and thin. We decided to make it blue with black tape. For our fins we did the same thing as the second rocket’s fins. In our group someone wanted to cut the body in half because in another class they had tiny rockets and they went 218 feet. But we used popsicle sticks and he was also outvoted. 

We didn’t work so well when deciding to change our rocket. Like when someone wanted to cut it in half so it was a tiny rocket, it became a big mess. Then our teacher came around and told him we couldn’t change it again, but he just kept picking popsicle sticks and kept pulling them out until he picked his name. It got annoying at times but in the end it was good and we always have a way to figure it out.

We also launched our rocket #3 at first my class thought we were just building it but then our teacher decided to let us launch it. Our rocket went 153 feet high! The third launch was our highest launch! We were super surprised with the results and didn’t think it would go that high. We tied with team Chicos. Their average was the highest! We were all super happy! 

At the launch, I think it was the best moment from the start of the unit because we knew it would be ending soon and we all challenged each other really well. It helped me because I never knew if we would fight or not and we did, but we always resolved it.

Launching and Graphing Rocket #2

Our second launch was also good and I was surprised that it didn’t go higher than our other rocket because when you looked up it looked a lot higher. Again I thought it would fail but of course I was wrong again which is great! I am very happy with our results. Though because the group that went the highest basically had the same design and our rocket didn’t go higher than that group’s rocket. I was confused about but it’s okay. My team job was pumper because last time I got one of the “good” jobs. But I didn’t really care because it wasn’t “boring”. I thought it was kinda fun and you got to see the pressure of the air go up! 

 

Our teams launch when we launched everyone looked up and it look like it was almost 150 feet high! I had my hopes up when it came back down that it went really high. But when we asked the clinometer readers they said it only went 121 feet high. Our team was still happy but we were also kinda sad that it didn’t go higher than expected.

 

In my class, almost everyone went higher than 100 feet. Except for one group, but it went 96 feet which is still high. My groups rocket went 3 feet higher than last time, which I’m actually pretty happy about. Not every group has wrote down how high their rocket has gone but so far the highest rocket went 136 feet high! Last time, the highest rocket went 192 feet high. I think when everyone changed something it totally made a difference in the rockets.

 

Our team was so happy after the launch and we were such a good team! During the launch we were all happy we could almost hug each other, but we didn’t. I think our teamwork paid off even though we argue sometimes. When we aren’t arguing we are getting along and laughing together. Because all of us but Charles were working on the presentation, he graphed it. He did a good job and that was our final graph.

 

After we had launched we all sat down by a tree to take notes of what we observed.

Designing and Building Rocket #2

After we had launched our first rocket we had moved on to building and designing our second rocket. To design it we copy and pasted our first rocket design onto a new google drawing. The rule was, we could only change one thing on our rocket. Not two or three because then we wouldn’t know what failed. My group decided to change the fins because one of the groups that went the highest had skinny, and tall, fins. So we did the same thing almost to improve our rocket. After we had changed our fins we changed up the color too. Our rocket body was skinny, the nose cone was point and small, and the fins were thin, and tall. 

Building our rocket was so much easier than building the first rocket, because we had already built a rocket we knew what to do to build our second rocket. It was easy this time. We folded up the paper to make our body, though that did take a few tries only because we kept on letting go of the paper and kept unrolling. Other than that it was pretty easy to build the rocket. The nose cone was super easy to make. I made it. I had to put tape all around it too but that was easy for me. The fins everyone else took care of because I was doing the nose cone. After we had got everything on we were set and good for our next launch.

With my group everyone was agreeing on everything. It turned out to be good and in the beginning I thought the group could never get along but after the first launch, we all had a better bond. Though while designing we did argue rarely about colors of the rocket, how big and small fins were, and deciding what the one thing would be that we’d change from the first rocket. But after all, I’m happy with my group. 

Launching and Graphing Rocket #1

A day after we had finished designing and building our rockets our teacher told us we would launch the next day. Everyone was so excited for our first launch! My team could not wait for the launch!

For our launch there were jobs. One job was launching and placing the rocket, another was countdown master and rocket retriever, and the last two jobs were air pumpers. For our first launch how we decided jobs was we picked out of paper in a cup. We all put our names in and we picked out one name. That one name got to pick what they wanted their job to be first. My name got picked second and I picked rocket launcher and placer. 

The day of the rocket launch we went out to the field and everyone gathered around to listen to the instructions. My team went last because we are the last team, team 6. When one team went there were four clinometer readers and they would split into two groups and one would go to the back field and one would to the blacktop. Then when the team launches the readers get into action and they use the clinometer to read how high it goes. Our team’s rocket went pretty high! It went 118 Feet high! Wasn’t as high as the other teams but we are still proud of how high it went. I think it was a very successful launch as I thought it would be a big fail. Nothing fell so I was very happy about that!

Everything was good with the collaboration, and I think we all got along much. Sometimes we had arguments but not very much. It was rare if we had an argument.  I think after launch #1 our relationships with each other got stronger and better.

 

Designing and Building Rocket #1

Designing our rocket was hard. We couldn’t always agree on what our parts of the rocket would  look like. Half our group wanted long fins and the other half didn’t want that. But someone in the group was always messing around and stuff so it was very hard to work. 

We had a pointy nose cone so that the air hits off the top and helps it glide better. We had a skinny body because it will shoot up instead of slowing down with the wider tube. We also had 3 fins because it will help with stability and the fins will help the fins stay in the direction the rocket is launched in.

Building our first rocket also took a lot of time and we didn’t know exactly how to build it like what materials and stuff. We didn’t know what color it’d be and what tape we’d use for the rocket and what color the fins would be and stuff. We had to always vote while building our rocket. We didn’t very much get long. But in the end our rocket turned out great and the launch was successful!

Rocketry Reflection

In class we are doing a unit in science called Rocketry. Right now we are designing our first rocket design! All we have done is our inspiration board and the inspiration board is supposed to inspire us.

The inspiration board took a long time because my group didn’t really know what stuff to put. We were also disagreeing about what quotes inspire us personally. We were having a pretty hard time finding out what to put and we put “the three laws of motion” by Isaac Newton but our teacher said we had to put a text box about how it helped us with our rocket design and we did not know what that exactly meant when she said it. We then took very long to figure out what to write and by then we were a mess and behind all the other groups. We finished a few days after.

Our rocket design is very simple. How we came up with was that two of our group members made each a rocket on google drawings, but after they had finished we had realized that they were the same except they were different colors. The other two group members then voted on which one was better and then the group members who voted made a rocket each and the same thing happened. They voted. We then took the two winners rockets and combined them! It was cool to see the features on one combined with another, and that became our final first rocket design.