Playing with water rockets on Father’s Day

My younger son has a water rocket project for his 6th grade science class. I thought that playing around with his rocket would make for a fun little project this morning because there was an interesting (sort of) math-related question he wanted to answer -> what amount of water would propel the rocket to the maximum height?

What I ended up learning was that being a good 6th grade science teacher is probably a bit out of reach for me . . . .

Here are a few trials (and fails) as we tested various amounts of water:

Here’s our final attempt with 500 ml of water in the rocket and some extra help from me to prevent the rocket from falling over.

Two wrap up we went inside and looked at what data we had.

So, maybe not our best project ever in terms of getting results, but a fun one anyway. Definitely a fun way to spend an hour on Father’s Day.