Mrs. Hirshoff’s students set out to see how many rubber bands it would take to make a pumpkin explode this week!
Each of the group’s numbers varies, though on Day 1 it took 516 and 659 rubber bands for regular pumpkins to burst. A brown gourd pumpkin took 504 rubber bands while a red warty pumpkin took 984!
Students will do some statistical work to find the mean, median, mode and range, and will compare pumpkin types and talk about their hypothesis. In class, they will discuss factors that may have affected the experiment and talk about force and potential energy.
Next year, Mrs. Hirschoff hopes to get a Sensor Kit to measure how much force is created in the explosion!
