Design Squad Giant Pop-Fly Challenge

Jay and Erion are making a giant pop fly. We got the mini pop-fly directions from the Design Squad website. We will put a paint can, put the wooden board through the handle of the paint can, at the end there is a ball, and when somebody jumps on the other end the ball flies.

Pop Fly Challenge — One, Two, Three Catch!

A Challenge from Judy and Adam

Pop Fly Challenge — More PBS Kids DESIGN SQUAD Experiments

DESIGN SQUAD is made up of Judy and Adam who create challenges and see how they work out. They have challenges like the Kick Stick Challenge and the Roving the Moon Challenge.

They show more challenges on the website PBS Kids.org that are fun, but challenging. Judy and Adam are going to actually take some time out of their day to come to Hillwood, so we can interview them! We're going to be able to show them all the projects we have made with their neat ideas.

Today, Clara and I did something called a "Pop Fly Challenge." We created a device to launch ping-pong balls into the air, using: cups, duct tape, and paint stirrers. When we launched our ping-pong into the air we caught it usually every time.

For our project, we had to make a cage out of a part of one of the cups to keeps the ball in place.

Our project resembles a see-saw because when we hit one end, the ball flies up on the other. We also were able to catch our ball in a cup, much like basketball.

On PBS Kids Go there are plenty of challenges, including the Pop Fly Challenge, which we were doing this week.

Pop Fly Challenge

Today Alysen and I did something called the Pop Fly Challenge, from PBS Kids DESIGN SQUAD that features science and technology based projects that Judy and Adam put together.

The Pop Fly Challenge is a thing where you build a design to launch ping pong balls high enough to catch.We even caught the launched ping-pong ball in a cup.

Our launcher was a paint stirrer on top of a paper cup.The paint stirrer had a ping-pong ball on one end and nothing on the other so it looked sort of like a see-saw. At one end of the paint stirrer there was a little piece of paper. We would lean the ping pong ball on the paper then hit the other end of the paint stirrer and the ping pong ball would go flying.

At first the paint stirrer was laying on the cup when we launched it and Alysen caught it. Then we pushed the paint stirrer up a little more, it went even higher. When we finally pushed it to the highest point, the ping pong ball whacked the ceiling and I caught it.

You could try the pop fly challenge and tons of other cool experiments at the PBS Kids DESIGN SQUAD website.

On October 22nd, Adam and Judy from the Design Squad are coming in to Hillwood to talk to us and see our experiments! We will be interviewing them about their work and their experiments.

The picture above to the left is Adam and Judy's launcher. The picture to the right is mine and Alysen's launcher.

The above is a video of the Pop Fly Challenge.