🚀 Straw rocket nose shapes: the whole packet

🚀 Straw rocket nose shapes · 3rd–7th grade · 1 day of testing · free · 50 minutes a sitting

My days, if the fair is 14 days away

Count back from your fair day and write in each date. Fewer days than this? The jobs share days, in this order; nothing is skipped.

Dates from my teacher

• My question is due
• Testing starts
• My results table and graph are due
• My board is due

In this packet

1. 🗓️ My project plan
2. 💭 My hypothesis
3. 🧺 Change, measure, keep the same
4. 🪜 My steps
5. 📊 My results
6. 📓 My logbook
7. ✅ My conclusion
8. ✂️ Board titles to cut out
9. 🏅 The judge's questions and my certificate

If I change the shape of the rocket's nose, then how far the rocket flies will ________________, because _____________________________________________

What I think will happen, in my own words:

3 levels × 3 tries at each = 9 tries in all. If anything you keep the same changes, you won't know which change made the difference.

What I need

• 📄 Paper: 3 sheets
• 🥤 Straws: 1
• ✏️ A pencil
• 🩹 Masking tape, to mark lines
• 📏 A tape measure, or a long ruler
• ✂️ Kid scissors
• 🩹 Tape

Be safe: 🙅 Never at faces

1. Cut three strips of paper and roll each around a pencil into a tube.
2. Tape each tube shut along its side, and slide it off the pencil.
3. Fold one tube's end flat and tape it: the flat nose.
4. Tape a short paper cone on the second tube and a long cone on the third.
5. Stand behind a tape line and slide a rocket onto your straw.
6. Aim at the floor ahead, never at anyone, and give one quick puff.
7. Measure from the line to where it landed, and write it down.
8. Launch each rocket three times.
9. Find the middle distance for each nose and draw a bar graph.

Write each number in your results table the moment you measure it.

I changed: Nose shape   I measured: how far the rocket flies (cm)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: nose shape along the bottom, cm up the side)

What I noticed: ______________________________________________

Write something every day you work on it, even the days you only gather things. More days? The three-page logbook prints from peabody.kids/science-fair/templates/logbook.

My hypothesis was ☐ right ☐ partly right ☐ not right.

I know because my numbers show:

What surprised me, or what might have gone wrong (7th and up):

Next time I would test:

Idea: Change a second thing: add paper fins to half your rockets, and test every nose with fins and without.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: does a pointed nose make a straw rocket fly farther?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing the shape of the rocket's nose would change how far the rocket flies, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed the shape of the rocket's nose (Flat, folded shut, Short pointed cone, Long pointed cone) and measured how far the rocket flies in cm.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept the same straw to blow through and the same size of paper tube the same, so only the shape of the rocket's nose was different.
5. How many times did you test it? Say something like: 3 times at each of my 3 levels, and I found the middle number.
6. What did you find out? Show me in your numbers. Say something like: Look at my table: Flat, folded shut and Long pointed cone gave different numbers, and here's the pattern.
7. Was your hypothesis right? How do you know? Say something like: My numbers show whether I was right, partly right or not, and I can show you where.
8. Did anything go wrong, or surprise you? Say something like: One try was odd, so I did it again and wrote it in my logbook.
9. If you did it again, what would you change or test next? Say something like: I'd change a second thing: add paper fins to half your rockets, and test every nose with fins and without.