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Eastern Students Celebrate Final Launch

Eastern students launch water rockets for their final project.

Only one week after NASA sent its final space shuttle into space, students from Summer Fun program celebrated a launch of their own — hand-made water rockets in front of Upper Moreland High School July 14.

The launch took place at 9:15 a.m. and was part of the summer program’s "Future Design Engineers Wanted." 

“I told my students it took Orville and Wilbur Wright seven years to build the world's first successful airplane at Kitty Hawk so don’t give up,” Richard DiMarco, program instructor, said.

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The three-week course challenges students to design, test and build model bridges, planes, and water rockets. The course ran from June 27 to July 15 from 8:30 to 11:20 a.m.

DiMarco’s course invited his 17 students to voice their ideas, solve problems that may occur while working on a project, build a scale model and display the finished product.

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“I believe in having a loose structure to energize them and to give them room for creativity,” he said.

Amy Shields, organizational advancement director, credited DiMarco, in his fourth year with Eastern, for the enrichment program’s success.

“‘Future Design Engineers Wanted’ course is our most popular class,” Shields said. “I had to put students on a waitlist.”

All projects in the course were not graded. However, models of sturdy hospital, roller coasters and catapults scattered throughout the classroom provided evidence that real learning has occurred.

“The students are responsible for their own designs and calculations,” DiMarco boasted. “By the final week, they all were running their own projects.”

Diverging from past years, DiMarco had his students experiment with building different types of rockets once a week.

“The bottle is half filled with water and sealed,” Richard DiMarco, program instructor, said. “The bottle is then pressurized to 40 PSI with air from a bicycle pump. The seal on the nozzle of the rocket is then released and water is expelled at high speeds. The release of the water causes the rocket to launch a considerable distance into the air.”

He said it was too soon to tell if future rocket scientist emerge from this program. However, these young engineers had something to say about this.

“I used a little bit of water, which created a lot pressure,” Colm Mahoney, 12, said. “I also added caps in the nose to create explosion. I think it went about 20 to 30 feet.”

One rocket went approximately 50 feet into the air. That rocket belonged to Grant Waltrin, 15. Even with that success, Waltrin was not satisfied.

“If I had to make changes, I would make the nose cone bigger,” he said.

Despite many successful launches, there were some rockets that did not go as planned.

Isak Gomez, 13, said that his multi-layered two-chambered rocket was “way too heavy.” Both chambers were filled with water and did not lift off. DiMarco made a point to praise the innovative rocket even if the launch was unsuccessful.

“I should probably have made a single chamber with a more pointed cone for a nose,” Gomez said.

The Summer Fun program is designed for students grades seven through nine. It is a three-week enrichment program in the summer that gives students a hands-on experience in classes such as Auto Mechanics and Collision Repair, Computer Art / Digital Photography, Cooking and Baking, Crime Scene Investigation, Drawing and Painting, Future Design Engineers Wanted, Looking Good, World of Construction, and Welding, according to Shields.

Eastern is a public school serving students in nine Eastern Montgomery County school districts including Abington, Bryn Athyn, Cheltenham, Hatboro-Horsham, Jenkintown, Lower Moreland, Springfield Township, Upper Dublin and Upper Moreland. The campus is located at 3075 Terwood Road in Willow Grove.

For more information, visit call 215-784-4806 or visit www. Eastech.org.

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