Rocket Science 101: DMS students take learning into “space” (PHOTOS and VIDEO)

With a budget of $1 million and two weeks to work, Dave Evans’ math students successfully designed rockets and put them into space last week.

“Space for them is 17 meters,” said Evans, donning a flight suit and carrying pieces of the launch pad out to the yard at Destin Middle School.

He was followed by five teams of seventh-graders that managed every detail of building a homemade rocket, from budgeting to constructing their final products.

“I gave this class a problem and a task to solve,” Evans explained.

He’s newcomer to the DMS faculty, getting hired on in October to teach math to the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grades.

After a 22-year Air Force career as a test pilot, Evans found a way to stay in touch with his love of flying by modeling an in-depth learning project for his math students — a project he fondly called E-Prize.

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For photos of the launch, click here.

To watch a video of the rockets shooting skyward, click here.

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Evans got approval from the X PRIZE Foundation to mimic a class project after their mission, challenging entrepreneurial development of innovations to benefit humanity. The non-profit awards multi-million dollar jackpots to winning breakthroughs.

However, Evans’ project did not require his students to solve world problems, only to make the grade with team work and ingenuity.

Prior to launching the rockets, each team was responsible for filling the roles necessary to carry out the project. Each group employed an altitude checker, project manager, budget director and a rocket launcher to get the experience of working together — and on budget — to launch a rocket into the air.

“This tells how high the rocket will go,” said 13-year-old James Majors, showing his measuring instrument.

As the altitude checker for RocketTech, Majors waited on cue to measure how high their rocket would fly into “space.” He used a protractor with a weighted string attached to it to measure the angle of the peak in their rocket’s climb toward the sky. But not before their rocket was fueled with water that functioned as “very explosive jet fuel.”

Evans threw up a pinch of grass to monitor which way the wind was blowing. He then pumped each bottle with 30 psi of air pressure and the group’s launcher pulled the cord connected to the launch pad from the safety of a carpet remnant a few feet away.

On “detonation,” the height of each rocket’s ascent was recorded by the group’s altitude checker.

A lot of cooperative learning happened before the countdown could begin.

Evans had the students research online what a rocket looks like, then sketch it, scale it and draw up plans. He gave them a list of “subcontractors” they could use to buy supplies from out of their budget.

The materials each group used to construct the rockets were pretty simple. Each rocket’s base was a two liter soda bottle modified to shoot up several meters, then fall gracefully with the help of a trash bag parachute.

Duct tape fastened three fins made of Poster Board or a CD split in half to the bottle. Paper cones housed the parachutes in the nose of the rockets to make them more aerodynamic.

Throughout the fabrication of these rockets, the teams used principles of physics, the metric system and interpreted graphs to predict how their rockets would perform.

The students wrote fictitious checks for everything from materials to advice from a consultant (Evans) and tracked their expenditures with balance sheets.

Majors said that losing any information along the way came at a price.

Evans graded his students on how well they tracked their money and on the accuracy of their drawings and calculations.

“I think it turned out really well,” Evans said. “They got a chance to put into practice the math they use.”

He said the students worked hard to manage their time and make decisions on a tight deadline.

The winning group of the 1st annual E-Prize will be announced on June 3rd and the group’s name will be inscribed on a trophy housed in the school’s media center. But Evans believes the biggest reward has come from the lessons learned.

“The real world application of math and project management will prepare them for everyday life,” he said.