Tinkering with trebuchets

By JENNA DAVISON
EISENHOWER HIGH SCHOOL
Hannah Meyer, a physical science teacher at Eisenhower High School, didn’t know what to expect when she put her students to work on trebuchets.
It was her first time doing the project. She got the idea from Rebecca Guerrero, a science teacher across the hall.
“I was worried they wouldn’t like the project,” Meyer said of her freshmen.
And she couldn’t have been more wrong.
Her ninth-grade physical science students plunged right into their group projects of building trebuchets. In the end, five classes with a total of 130 students had a 100-percent completion.
Depending on their complexity, the trebuchets took students anywhere from two days to one week for the groups to complete.

“A lot of people compare trebuchets to catapults, but trebuchets have counterweights,” 15-year-old TJ Cole explains. “Catapults don’t.”
The original trebuchets, back in medieval times, were built from huge trees and five-ton counterweights. They launched 250 pound iron balls. The students in Meyer’s class were required to use popsicle sticks in their construction.
Some groups launched tennis balls, others marbles. Perhaps the strangest things launched in class were eggs.
But that was not as strange as some of the original objects launched from the 5th to 15th centuries.
“Sometimes, they would launch dead, infected bodies to give everyone the plague inside the castles,” Meyer says.
In her class, groups built walls to destroy for extra credit. And groups that launched their object the farthest won.
The process involved a lot of math as well as science. Building trebuchets deals with ideas such as motion, speed, velocity and acceleration.
And building the trebuchets couldn’t have been done without help from woodshop teacher Ryan Alexander. Nearly all of the students needed help finding pieces of wood, cutting those pieces of wood and adding the counterweights.
They also had a lot of questions. And Alexander didn’t mind.
“I love kids, and they need to learn the laws of physics,” he says.
But the most challenging part of the assignment, for some students, was working with partners.
“I learned to communicate better,” says 14-year-old Jessica Herd.
Others, like 15-year-old Bianca Villa, thought the construction was difficult.
“I learned about the concepts of Newton’s three laws, momentum and other science stuff,” she says.
Still, students had a lot of fun. And nearly no one got hurt.
“We hit someone when we launched the first time,” says 16-year-old Gabriel Garcia.
“I didn’t want my students to just learn out of the textbook,” Meyer says. “They need to experience problem-solving. And throwing in a little math without them knowing is good, too.”

— Jenna Davison is a junior at Eisenhower High School and a member of the Herald-Republic’s Unleashed journalism program for high school students.