For his Science Fair project, Einstein decided to make a Balloon Rocket Car. We are a last-minute family typically and this year’s science fair was no exception. So it may or may not have been the morning of the event that we finally had all the supplies and were ready to assemble his project! That may explain why the Balloon Rocket Car project became a Balloon Rocket Boat project!
Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the wheels on the car round enough to get it to move well. Had we left ourselves more time, I would have had time to go back to the deli at the grocery store and ask for another foam tray to cut more wheels out of and I would have had time to dig through boxes in our storage room to find my circle cutter with my scrapbook things to cut perfect circles. But… this is real life and it’s our life and as usual, we left things to the last minute!
This was the Balloon Rocket Car…
Necessity is the mother of all invention so The Husband came up with the idea to instead have him make a Balloon Rocket Boat! Einstein took a Lego boat and duct taped a straw down the center of it and secured a balloon onto the end of the straw. We put some water in one of our workbox bins, set the boat on top, and it worked!
By inflating the balloon through the straw, the boat propelled itself through the water! Einstein then wrote out Newton’s third law and how it applied to this experiment and drew a picture for his display board.
What a fun! We made balloon lego cars for a project at our coop last fall. All the kids loved it.