It's science fair time!! Since I have a room full of boys (only 2 girls!). I try to find something that is interesting to boys. They love crashing, bashing, and destroying things, so catapults seem like a great fit. First, we learned a little about catapults and why they were used. They loved the fact that catapults were used to crash through and hurl large boulders over castle walls. We wanted to build the best catapult we could. One that would shoot a giant boulder (mini-marshmallow) the greatest distance so we would have the strongest army. We used a block of wood, thumbtacks, rubber band, and plastic spoons of various lengths. The class voted unanimously that the longer spoon would hurl our boulder the greatest distance. We set up the catapult and conducted 10 trials with the short spoon and 10 trials with the long spoon. We measured the distance of each marshmallow and averaged the lengths. The results: The short spoon won!! It was able to hurl a marshmallow 10 1/2 feet and the long spoon was only able to hurl 6 3/4 feet. The kids had a blast! If you are interested in my catapult smartboard file, you can find it here.
