In working with geometric shapes and angles we happened across some of the more interesting applications to our intro to Algebra. Quickly concieving the notion that hands on migh work better than paper and pencile we moved from the drawing board right to the workshop and dragged out the old connects for this project.
Balancing equations can be pretty dull stuff in the classroom even in homeschool so we decided to build a catapult to measure the F=MA equation I gave the kids. Granted the force was pretty subjective as you had to pull the lever back to a given mark on the machine. But it worked suficiently well enough to get the essage across. We were looking at how far a catapult would send objects of differing mass flying across the boat. This worked out much better than I expected as we could set the catapult up with fairly consistent results for a given object and really see how the heavy objects did not go as far as their lighter counterparts.
Then it became all about range and angles to make the objects fly farther. We had accidentaly begun the physics of trajectory and rocket science. The boys played with this for over 3 hours that morning taking measurements and recording their findings to later graph them and show Jean and I.