MORAN — “Fire away!” IF TIME permits, Owens will introduce other exercises, such as bridge constructions projects, in which the spans are made of toothpicks.
With that command, Marmaton Valley High ninth-grader Justice Pugh released the wooden arm to his catapult, sending a small rubber ball hurtling toward its goal, a buried cup 15 feet away.
The ball came tantalizingly close to hitting its mark, but landed a few inches past.
Another miss.
“We had one get pretty close,” algebra instructor Rob Owens said. “It hit the side of the cup but bounced out.”
Monday’s catapult session capped a weeklong introduction into parabolas, Owens explained.
A parabola — the arc a projectile follows — can be determined if three factors are known: its starting and end points, and its maximum height.
“Our next assignment is for these kids to graph their attempts,” Owens said.
Each student’s attempt was measured, so they know the distances their attempts traveled. Owens stood by with a measuring pole to determine their maximum height.
“Then they’ll be asked the height the ball was when it was one foot out, and so forth,” Owens said. “It’s a great project to introduce quadratic equations that the students really enjoy.”
Owens is fond of using real-life examples to better illustrate textbook lessons.
“We were going to do something on basketball,” following the arc a ball travels when a player attempts a shot, for instance, Owens said. “We couldn’t find a pole tall enough for that.”
The students were given simple directives. They had to come up with a device capable of accumulating tension, which when suddenly released, launches an object.
Most used wooden contraptions, with attached pieces of rubber to provide the tension, although another was made of metal, with a spoon acting as the firing arm.
“Whatever they could find was acceptable,” Owens said. “I thought they did very well. It was interesting to see what they came up with.”
The catapults were assembled in short order, before the students spent the balance of the week making adjustments prior to Monday’s test.
He leads another project in which students calculate projected earnings from specific jobs, then create a budget to determine if they could realistically live off the income.
“It’s fun to get them to learn in other ways than reading from a book,” he said.
Ingenuity on display as students launch catapult project
