Pumpkin Catapults: Investigating energy and forces of motion

Pumpkin catapults is an awesome hands-on engineering project that can be used before, during, or after Halloween. Students will learn about simple machines, specifically levers as they explore, design, and test their pumpkin catapult. Students will also be given opportunities to modify their design and test for both distance and accuracy. During this investigation students will learn about Newton's 1st Law of Motion and the relationship between potential and kinetic energy. Many math connections for measurement and data collection are possible, including mean, median, mode, range, graphing, and measuring. Your students will love this STEM challenge and you will too. Materials are cheap and so many connections to force of motion standards and data and measurement apply. This purchase includes teacher pages, a mini-lesson I give to students prior to the investigation covering simple machines, catapults, forces of motion and energy (PPT has been turned into a PDF and can't be changed), and two different lab sheets- one for upper elementary/middle school, and one for lower elementary grades.