Normal Park students explore STEM through Rocket Moc launches

Miles, a Normal Park Museum Magnet School student, points toward the sky while tracking a model rocket launch during a Rocket Mocs activity. Photo by Angela Foster.

Dozens of middle school students gathered on the football field at Normal Park Museum Magnet School on a recent Friday to watch small rockets they helped design launch into the sky.

For many of the students, it was their first time watching a rocket launch.

The activity was led by students and staff from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. For UTC senior mechanical engineering major Diego Garcia, the event was more than a simple STEM project, as Garcia once attended Normal Park himself.

“It feels pretty good to be back here,” Garcia said. “I got to see a lot of my old middle school teachers going, ‘Hey, what’s going on, what are you doing here?’”

Garcia helped organize the launch as part of outreach connected to UTC’s Rocket Mocs team and its participation in NASA’s University Student Launch Initiative. Garcia had a STEM engagement requirement for NASA USLI and realized reaching out to local schools would be a “cool way” to have a hands-on rocket launch event.

“I started contacting different schools,” Garcia said. “I thought if we could do an event like this with an eighth-grade class, it would be a fun way to introduce them to rocketry.”

Around 70 Normal Park middle school students attended the event. Prior to launch day, the students had the opportunity to choose different components—including fin shapes and nose cones—which would affect the rockets’ altitude or speed.

Once the rockets were assembled, the students gathered outside to watch the rockets take flight. The rockets were made to go about 100 feet in the air.

“Once the rockets actually went off, you could see the students start to brighten up and go, ‘Whoa,’” Garcia said. “Watching the students’ reactions has been the most rewarding part of the experience.”

UTC engineering students stand in a line on a grassy field explaining model rocketry to a group of middle school students seated nearby during a Rocket Mocs outreach activity.

UTC engineering students Gabriel Mejia, left, Joshua Jackson, Diego Garcia and Everett Stockman accompanied UC Foundation Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Trevor Elliott to the Normal Park Museum Magnet School event.

The outreach event was supported by faculty members involved with the University’s rocketry program, including UC Foundation Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Trevor Elliott, the faculty advisor for the UTC Rocket Mocs team.

Elliott said activities like these are important for students to help them discover things they might not have considered otherwise.

“If students don’t get hands-on involvement in engineering aspects, they don’t necessarily know that it’s a field they are interested in,” Elliott said.

For Normal Park eighth-grade science teacher Ashley Carr, the launch was tied directly to earlier discussions about Newton’s laws of motion.

“At the beginning of the year we spent a lot of time learning Newton’s laws,” Carr said. “One of the very famous examples of Newton’s third law is rocketry, so it’s really cool to get to see that in action.”

Before the launch day, she said the students learned about and discussed how different rocket parts could affect the launch. After the launches, the students discussed whether their design choices helped them achieve their original goal.

“They’re making a hypothesis, experimenting and then analyzing their results,” Carr said.

Josie, an eighth grader at Normal Park, said she “liked watching all the rockets launch. I was surprised how high they went.”

Her classmate, Miles, said the activity was unlike anything he had done in school.

“Just getting to watch all of them go super high into the sky was really cool,” Miles said. “I enjoyed it a lot.”

Garcia hopes events like these will give younger students a chance to see a different side of science and engineering, and help them realize they might want to explore it more in the future.

“I just think it is important to broaden horizons,” Garcia said. “They don’t know what they’re missing until they get to experience it; maybe they will see it and think this is actually pretty neat.”