Students launch water balloons at teachers

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WHEAT RIDGE - It must be a middle school student's dream - permission to fire a wet, messy projectile at your teacher in the name of science.

"I've been instigating them all year, having them want to hit me with a water balloon is good motivation for wanting to learn and try to solve a problem," Jeff Larson, a mathematician from the University of Colorado Denver, said.

Larson and seven other graduate students are working to bolster the teaching of science and mathematics in public schools, especially in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade levels. They are there as a result from a grant through the National Science Foundation.

"I got 10 balloons here," Larson told science classes at Everitt Middle School on Wednesday. "And I'm gonna let you launch nine of them, just to see what happens and I'm gonna go stand out there for the 10th balloon, and you're gonna try and hit me."

He built a three-foot tall wooden slingshot which can fire water balloons as far as 100 meters away.

"It's better because you're not reading out of a textbook, I guess," Trevor Lombardi, an eighth grader, said. "I guess it'll be fun because people just want to see him get wet by a balloon."

The students used information such as balloon mass, force, and distance on the first nine launches to gauge how far back to pull the slingshot on the 10th launch. Larson says he didn't expect any students to hit him.

"This is a really hard problem," Larson said. "I don't really want to get wet, no."

Every class during the day missed him, until the honor students took aim in the sixth hour.

"They were talking about how hard it was and all the other classes couldn't do it," Phillip Williamson, an eighth grade honors student, said.

Williamson and his classmates hit Larson three times as far as 40 meters away. They hit him one time perfectly square on the head.

"Nice job, good calculation," Larson said to the students.

They got a little revenge all in the name of science.

"It's just fun," Williamson said.