Aero Dreams Take Flight

Ahmad Faiziah watched his first rocket soar into the sky — with his eye on an eventual visit to the international space station.

Faizah and 54 other Engineering and Science University Magnet School eighth graders Wednesday reignited a ritual: the end-of-year rocket launch.

The eighth-graders walked in three waves to a University of New Haven (UNH) athletics complex parking lot with the fruits of weeks of labor learning how rockets fly, designing nose cones and pins on Autodesk Inventor in Michael Petrescu’s aeronautical engineering course, then building and assembling their own rockets out of balsa wood and cardboard in Mac William’s shop class.

Wednesday was the first time ESUMS eighth-graders were able to participate in the ritual since Covid-19 sent classes into remote mode, then tied up supply chains.

“3 … 2 … 1 …” William counted down as Faiziah pressed the button. ​“say good-bye to it!” 

Off flew the rocket into the sky.

William did the same with Katherine Perez …

… who with her friends watched the rocket ascend, tracked its path, then raced around the parking lot to catch it.

Click on the video to watch her launch and hear about the process of igniting a rocket’s flight.

“I felt really good knowing that I built something, and it launched, and it worked,” Katherine said afterward.

She and her classmates (pictured) said they found the outdoor ritual a fun way to synthesize what they learned. It was part of a curriculum that has planted seeds of potential STEM careers, one of the 581-student 6 – 12th grade school’s goals.

Petrescu (pictured), a Romanian-born commercial pilot and flight instructor who has taught at ESUMS for 11 years, said that mastering basic flight principles is ​“opening up opportunities” for students to pursue careers as mechanical engineers, aerospace engineers, mathematicians, pilots.

Or astronauts. Ahmad (pictured) said that’s one of his career goals. ​“I like engineering,” he said. He follows work at the international space station, and ​“I follow Elon Musk.”

“You put force on the bottom to propel the rocket forward” by igniting the fuel, Ahmad said of his first launch. It won’t be his last.

See below for other recent Independent articles about teaching, reading, working and studying inside New Haven Public Schools classrooms.

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