One of the things I do besides being programming and soldering is being one of the four leaders of a group of boys and girls at a local scouting club. The boys and girs are 9 to 11 years of age, and we always try to entertain them with nice programs which usually have something to do with the general Scouting theme. That's not a requirement though, and when we get the opportunity to let the kids do something great, we jump at that occasion.
A few weeks ago, we had such an opportunity. Someone who led a group of a different age of kids at our club meddles with model rockets in his free time. He recently found a nice set of instructions to build working model rockets from cardboard that even our kids should be able to follow, and offered to help make a program out of it. Ofcourse we took him up at the offer: I don't think any of our kids would not enjoy building their own rocket and then seeing it go up into the air.
I myself couldn't resist the opportunity to launch a nice electronic device into the air, too, to make some measurements of a model rocket launch. It would be interesting to the kids, and nice to tell them some real data about the things that had gone up in the air, like how high and fast the rocket had gone.
I decided on sending up a data logger which would log the data of an 3-d accelerometer to a bit of memory. While I wasn't sure if I could calculate the velocity and height data from the measurements, if anything it'd make for some nice graphs and it wouldn't be that expensive.
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