On Halloween day, Physic classes launched pumpkins over a two meter wall and tried to hit their target. Photo by Calvin Tranby Suzane Jlelati, Staff Writer
On Halloween, the physics classes launched mini pumpkins across the baseball field for a chance to earn some extra credit and have a little fun learning about physics. The requirement was that the catapults had to have a latching mechanism.
Jeffrey Larson states the purpose of the assignment was, ”Basically to learn physics, specifically projectile motion and learning engineering skills. I was very impressed [with today’s catapults] we had two bullseye… very hard to get a bulls eye.”
The class immediately heads out to the baseball field with each groups catapults set up along the wall in front of the houses, ready for use. Larson asks for a group to volunteer and one by one groups bring up their catapults to the white line, place the small pumpkin into a canister of some sort such as a rounded plate or small pot, pull back the lever, then release. The goal is to aim the small pumpkin to the center target 10 meters away, over a two meter high goal post, coated in Halloween decorations.
The students had three tries to aim the target. Most groups landed their pumpkins on the target or very close to the bulls eye then rolled away, but only two groups hit it. Each group had different results; some pumpkins went straight up into the air and fell back down on or close to the target while some went far off target.
“I was pretty happy about it cause it was a chance to earn extra credit and to learn new things while building the catapult. [The catapult] did okay, the pumpkin didn’t go that far but it worked. Maybe making the lever go back a little bit more further and building more tension with cords would improve our catapult,” Julianna Ramirez (‘17) said.
Spectators from other classes came to watch the pumpkin launchings as well and took notes. The crowd, however, was more focused on how successful the catapults would be.
“I was very happy because [the catapult] counted as extra credit. We started two weeks ago, but yesterday we made the final model and it worked. We added more duct tape and bungee cords to improve our model,” Britney Pham (‘18) said.
