STEM Design Rubber Band Rockets Part 2)

Hi, I am Jared. Welcome to Fun Science Demos. In a previous video we showed you how to make our rubber band rocket cups. We are going to zoom in on this clear version of our rubber band rocket cup so we can see the science at work. We have zoomed in and you can see that I have two cups, a launch pad and my rocket cup with two rubber bands stretched across the top. As I push down on the top cup, it stretches those rubber bands and loads them with energy. It is that energy that allows our rocket cups to launch. Now remember that scientists like to design things to see if they can make something work better. So in this case the rubber band is on the rocket. I wonder what would happen if we tried to put those rubber bands on the launch pad instead. So instead of using cups as a launch pad, I tried using different containers. A pot, a plastic container and a plastic beaker. You notice I have stretched the rubber bands over these containers almost like a trampoline. Now when I bring my rocket in, there are no rubber bands on the rockets. All of the rubber bands are on my launch pad. Let us try it and see how it works. Now what we quickly realized is that we needed to add little taped handles on our rocket cup so it could give us something to grab as we try to launch it. So I set my rocket on the launch pad. I am going to use my little tape handles to pull down. I am adding the energy. Three, two, one and a failed launch. I am going to press down, add the energy and launch. Let us try that again. Perfect. So here we have three different types of launch pads. How can we figure out which launch pad works better? Well scientists like to gather data. They like to measure things. So we could measure how high our rockets go on each of these launch pads. Notice there are different numbers of rubber bands on each launch pad. So I can figure out if adding an extra rubber band makes my rocket go higher. I could also use a clock or a stopwatch to time how long my rocket is in the air. There are lots of things I can do to gather data to see which launch pad works the best. So we have tried changing our launch pad. Now it is time to try to see if we can have a different design for our rockets. So we started out by trying to tape two cups together but I quickly realized there is no way to attach the rubber band to this rocket. So I might have to use this rocket on the other launch pad we created. But I realized well if I could tape two cups together from the bottom ends and I could add this. There is my rubber bands and I have more of a cone shaped rocket. We are going to try this one out. This one, a couple cups are taped together and then I have the top of a bottle and this one looks more like a rocket. Let us give them a test launch and see how they work. Let us test our new rocket design out. Push it down on the launch pad. 3, 2, 1. Not bad. Let us try this rocket. Put it on the launch pad. Stretch it down. 3, 2, 1. That one went a lot higher and it stayed in the air a lot longer. The other neat idea we had is that we can modify our rockets in a different way. We can add some art to our rockets. In this case I turned our rocket cups into animals. We have a frog and a funny looking rabbit. This is a great way to involve younger kids in science. A lot of times scientists talk about STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math. But there is also something called STEAM, science, technology, engineering, the arts, and math. There is a lot of science and art. In this case we added our rubber band energy source to our animals. We are going to see which one hops higher. It is time for the frog to jump. In this case we only put one rubber band on our frog. Let us see how high our froggy can jump. Down on the launch pad. 3, 2, 1. The frog went pretty high. Now it is time for the rabbit. The rabbit has two rubber bands. Do you think it is going to go higher? Let us give it a shot. Push him down. 3, 2, 1. He jumped so far out I could not even catch him. The neat part about this is we can make a whole variety of different animals that hop. We could add kangaroos and grasshoppers. We could play around with them. Which one hops higher? We can measure it to find out. Which one stays in the air longer? We can measure that or time that to see which one wins. Science and engineering is all about going back and redesigning something to make it work better. If you want to learn more about energy and forces or if you want some more STEM idea challenges, check out our YouTube channel FunScienceDemos. Science is so cool, especially when it is in motion.