1. ENGAGE:
   There are several ways to engage students in this activity. You could start by showing Festival of Flight, which can be streamed from the the South Carolina Educational TV website or the Apple Learning Interchange to show your students the importance of studying space flight. This could be followed by the hands-on activity in the Educators Guide. Start the Rocket Challenge web activity with a story involving going to Mars and the need develop good rockets. You could discuss the relation between position, velocity and acceleration and discuss the role of gravity in the motion of rockets. Squeak, an engaging multimedia authoring environment, will grab the attention of young learners.
2. EXPLORE:
   In the Rocket Launch Challenge, your students should first explore different ways to make the rocket hit the clouds. Once they have a feeling for how the rocket works and how gravity affects the motion, they should take data on the rocket's motion. Have them work in groups with each member taking data for different rocket accelerations and burn times. By comparing their graphs, they will get a better understanding of the rocket's motion. Students can take data for position as a function of time, velocity as a function of time, or better yet, both. Next have your students explore how the rocket performs on the Moon or other planets. Finally, challenge them to take the Squeak project apart and create a two-stage rocket.
3. EXPLAIN:
   Have your students explain the concepts of position, velocity, acceleration and gravity in their own words. Have your students explain how these concepts relate to motion. Have your students explain how they took their data and show their plots. Then they should discuss what they can conclude from the data. To prepare students for an oral presentation, assign as homework the task to write out answers to the preceding questions. Encourage them to accompany their words with pictures they draw.
4. EXTEND:
   Close this window and follow the link in the Teacher Information area for a list of extensions with ideas ranging from straightforward to very challenging. You can modify the suggested extensions to fit the class time you have available.
5. EVALUATE:
   Have your students evaluate how reliable they believe their data to be and how their method of data gathering effected the results. Go to the NASA CONNECT web site to have your students submit their Squeak solutions for two-stage rockets and we will post them if they are good examples. They can save their Squeak projects using the publish button on the navigator flap.