More than 200 sixth-grade students in Gainesville visited NASA to present rockets they constructed in a middle-school science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) project to professional engineers.
Eddie Harper, a 12-year-old sixth-grade student and first-time participant in the STEM project, was one of hundreds of students launching rockets at Howard W. Bishop Middle School on Wednesday before visiting NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Titusville, Florida, on Thursday.
“We had to make the cylinder part of the body, and we folded the top piece over and added wings to the rocket,” Harper said. “Mine went up 70 feet.”
To make the project possible, the middle school collaborated with Hands on Gainesville, a local nonprofit that promotes STEM education.
This year, three teachers worked together to teach 60 groups of 4 to 5 students how to build different rockets: soft rockets, water bottle rockets and alpha III model rockets.
Chloe Winant, a sixth-grade science teacher for gifted students at the middle school, played a key role in making this project happen for all students in the school.
“The school has a magnet program that is for technology and gifted students,” Winant said, “and then there’s a general program that we like to call the major program, because it’s the majority of the students.”
Winant worked with two teachers from the major program to give students from different levels the opportunity to participate in the project as well.
Lynn Padgett, a sixth-grade science teacher for major program students, said rounding up donations and funding so that lower-income students could attend the $50 trip to NASA was one of the project’s great successes.
Padgett said the project taught students, parents and teachers the virtues of teamwork and perseverance.
“When we were planning the project and their field trip to NASA, I got a lot of calls from parents making sure their children could go,” Padgett said. “Fortunately, we were able to get some donations and scholarships.”
Next year, she said the school hopes to collaborate with Kids in the Woods, another local nonprofit that promotes wildlife learning, to teach students about bird and plant life in the Gainesville.
