High School students had a great time creating catapult experiments to study quadratic equations. The catapults were built with popsicle sticks, bottle caps, clothes pin, and a hot glue gun. Students used properties of parabolas to graph quadratic functions and identified characteristics of quadratic functions and their graphs by using a teaching tool for math called Desmos.
Students will recap the catapult project by connecting with science and engineering, finding that Catapult-like devices are sometimes used to launch planes and jets from aircraft carriers with limited runway space.
