Water Bottle Rocket

A couple of years ago I saw a video that capture my interest in creating a water rocket to demonstrate how Newton’s Laws act, hence how a rocket works, and have a bit of fun in the process. Over the intervening period, I forgot about it again, until recently when I came across another example on a BBC television programme, Bang goes the theory (I’ll return to this in a later post).

The latter version of the rocket is somewhat simpler in design, and can easily be recreated.

The original example I now remembered was a bit more involved as a project, and takes a little longer to create. I dug out my early Make Magazines from the garage and found the instructions in there. You can also access them online.

1. Easier design

This is an informative page about the principles, and how to recreate the design with a video embedded.

2. More involved design

This design takes a little more time and effort, and leads to a more ‘explosive’ result.

These are the online instructions from the Make Magazine volume 5 that I’ve got. This is Steve Lodefink’s original design, and there is a video of Steve firing his rocket.

A later instructional video, by Kip Kay is less successful with the rocket, but gives you some pointers.

Additional

You can even have water rocket parties, where you get the kids to decorate their rocket how they want, before launching them, as demonstrated in this finkbuilt post.

Squigly educational games

The Squigly site has a few very nice games, split into maths, spelling/typing/reading, geography, memory and matching and making connections. Some time dependent games seem a little quick at first, but maybe with practise the kids will get quicker and more accurate.

Art history

Smarthistory is an interesting site (historically categorized into different periods) that not only displays images of over 200 art works, but have well informed, engaging discussions as embedded audio.

Sixty Symbols – Nottingham University Physics & Astronomy videos

This site, Sixty Symbols, does for Physics and Astronomy what my last post, Periodic Table, did for Chemistry.

Links: Sixty Symbols dedicated site & YouTube channel

Periodic Table – Nottingham University Chemistry videos

Well these are (just a little bit) famous. The Chemistry dept. in Nottingham explaining the Periodic Table in separate videos.

The videos are hosted on their YouTube channel.

And there’s a dedicated site.