Physics class vs. zombies
Honors students at Rome High create their own contraptions for launching tennis balls — or bullets — at imaginary zombies for a class project.
Shouts and cheers rang from the Rome High practice football field Friday morning, as honors physics students fended off a zombie horde using knowledge of stored mechanical energy and a little ingenuity.
The zombie narrative, which fit right into the misty morning scene, was drummed up by teacher Randy Stafford as part of a physics project that calls on students to use what they learned in class to build homemade contraptions for launching tennis balls — or bullets in this case.
He said they previously used apples as ammo “in an ode to (Isaac) Newton,” but they stopped after a coach took him out to the field and pointed out an apple tree seedling.
With pictures of zombies attached atop sticks planted roughly 35 yards from the motley lineup of catapults, students took turns seeing if their device could achieve zombie-killing range. On down the line, Stafford judged each team’s apparatus on three basic requirements: It must meet the measurements of a 1-meter cube, be safe to operate and be able to store mechanical energy.
Some students followed a traditional catapult design — a frame with a lever that is pulled back to create tension in bungee cords, then pinned down
to store energy before being launched — while others built a trebuchet or went along a more creative path.
Like Bill Elder and Holden Young who built a compressed air cannon.
Using a bicycle pump, a chamber is filled with air to a designated psi level. When it comes time to fire, the valve is opened, blasting the ball out of the PVC tube.
On the duo’s first launch, at 30 psi, the ball landed between 30 and 35 yards. But after cranking it up to more than 100 psi their second time around, the ball vastly overshot the target, landing 85 yards downfield.
It took Elder and Young 10 hours to construct the cannon, they said.
Elder admitted they had pushed the cannon’s boundaries when giving it a test run.
“We were scared we were going to blow it up, so we stopped at 150 psi,” he said.
Other contraptions didn’t prove to be as functional, with one of them dissembling upon being fired, scattering pieces across the grass. However, Stafford offered an optimistic take on the matter, saying the catapult was a formidable zombie defense with a self-destruct feature.
The comment was one of many from Stafford, who, depending on the launch result, gave critiques on how to alter designs to reach greater distances or offered up sayings like, “Physics, she’s a cruel mistress.”
The group of Paullette Delgado, Ruby Martinez and Yazmine Perez used hundreds of rubber bands as part of their
wood-frame, slingshot-style catapult. A design Stafford said had “style points off the chart,” but in referencing its ability to function after the ball lost yards by the time it hit the ground, laughed he was “surprised y’all lived to this day.”
He joked with the girls, saying they could “hook that up to the back of Toyota pickup truck and go to Fallujah.”
The catapult project is something Stafford wishes he could do more, as he believes it gives the 11th-graders initiative.
As the class period came to close, Stafford called out for the students to make sure they didn’t leave their creations behind.
“Take it home and terrorize the neighborhood dogs,” he shouted.