Elida students' eyes on the skies

High school students are often told to aim for the sky. Those at Elida High School have chosen to take it literally. If all goes as planned, they'll do it again this year by launching their second rocket.

Four students at Elida have been working to design their own rocket and will travel to Houston this Wednesday to show their work to some of the top experts in the country at NASA.

Jayce Victor, Logan Victor, Lydia Barron, Johny Woodruff and their teacher Jessica Faucett will be making the trip.

"This feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It's a chance for us to go talk to some of the smartest people in the county," said Woodruff. "But they'll also be judging our work."

Their efforts are part of the Systems Go Rocketry program; a three-year program Elida began offering two years ago.

Their work might not be much to look at so far - just a bunch of equations they've done entered into an Excel spreadsheet meant to prove their rocket would be able to break the speed of sound before hitting 13,000 feet. Their previous rocket design simply needed to travel one mile with a one-pound load.

If their design is approved by the scientists at NASA, the group will then look into where to find parts to put together their second rocket.

The students say the class has been a challenging one. For each of them it was their first introduction to physics and they say the line between excelling and failing is a thin one. They said about six of their fellow students have had to drop it.

Jayce Victor plans to enter the astrophysics field after high school, meaning she's particularly excited about the Houston trip.

"I can't wait to meet people in that field and hear about their experiences," she said. "If you told me a year or two ago we'd be able to design and launch our own rockets, I wouldn't have believed you."

The rest of the team has no plans to pursue rocketry after high school, but say the program has helped them improve a lot of valuable skills and think outside the box for the careers they are interested in.

"The program is designed in such a way that allows the kids to problem solve and have a big end goal to keep them engaged and pushing," Faucett said. "It develops a lot of interpersonal skills too. It's so much more than just the physics. Its so much more like a real-world scenario than a regular class."

Faucett said there is one more class to the series that comes in the third year, but said Elida isn't ready to offer it yet. She has expanded the first level of the class to cover more grades however.

Faucett hopes to have everything ready within the next two years to offer students the full series. The third class is where the students would finally get a chance to build a rocket that can reach the edge of space.