Imaging of Matter
This has something to do with pressure!
12 August 2019
The "Light & Schools" school laboratory's holiday course on research introduced children of primary school age to physical topics in a playful way. For the team of coordinators, this means looking at basic physics from a different perspective and questioning the familiar.
"Why is a rocket flying?" asked Anna Albrecht from the Light & Schools school laboratory the 18 pupils of the Windmühlenweg primary school. The boys and girls of the 3rd and 4th grade attended a holiday course in the school laboratory and showed their enthusiasm in many creative answers.
"The children have often heard a lot about rockets or NASA. Especially then we can strengthen this knowledge by building a rocket and awaken the children's interest in physics. Before that, many children unfortunately only associate physics with one school subject and no exciting rocket launches," said Anna Albrecht. In the holiday course, the boys and girls were able to try out for themselves how the necessary positional energy could be reversed to the kinetic energy and thus ultimately make rocket flight possible.
"In my spare time I also like to experiment and pour different drinks together and see if something happens," said one pupil. With the ready-made rockets, the children moved into the courtyard, pumped air into the rockets and let them rise from the launch pad to the sky. In the end, they agreed that handicrafts and flying were the most fun.
"The work with pupils from primary school brings a completely different meaning to our work as basic physicists and challenges us to question even supposedly trivial things again and again and to look at them from new perspectives," concluded Dr. Jonas Siegl, who coordinates the school laboratory together with Bastian Besner.