Science + fun = learning

When you picture Sir Isaac Newton and his laws of motion, hip-hip music isn’t usually part of the vision. But last Friday afternoon at Mission Trail Middle School in Olathe, one performance group changed that with a dance and music-packed assembly about physics.

FMA Live! uses Newton’s ideas about objects in motion as the academic guideposts for its presentations but tries to make the topic more interesting and accessible for kids by incorporating hip-hop music, some very hands-on experiments and lots of energetic dance moves.

For the first law of motion, which states that objects in motion generally stay that way unless another force stops them, the onstage experiment used a Velcro wall to demonstrate.

Wearing Velcro suits, volunteers Dillan Emch and Trey Newton, both 11, each took turns jumping off a springboard and launching themselves into the prepared wall. Because their motion stopped when they hit the wall, the boys were able to clearly illustrate Newton’s point.

“It was pretty exciting, but I was nervous at first,” Trey said. “I think it was all around pretty fun and taught people a lot of things.”

The curriculum for the presentation comes from a joint venture between Honeywell and NASA that’s meant to encourage students to take an interest in science, technology, engineering and math, collectively known as STEM.

The show and its three performers travel all over North America giving the presentations. The Mission Trail event included a show for sixth-graders and a show for seventh- and eighth-graders. In the 11 years the show has been going, they’ve had about 1,150 performances.

Last week, they also presented the show to the same age groups at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Grandview Middle School.

John James, one of the show’s performers and its leader, has been with the group for four years.

“We are all coming together to make science simple and fun,” he said.

Although he enjoyed science in school, he think he would have been “more impressed” by it if there had been presentations like this one.

Another onstage demonstration gave students a better idea how mass can affect the amount of forces necessary to make an object accelerate. Lea Austin, 11, went on stage to kick a few different soccer balls. The first was pretty average. The second was much bigger, and the third looked to be 5 or 6 feet tall — much too big to be budged by the swift kick of a sixth-grader.

Possibly the most popular demo was the one dealing with Newton’s third law of motion — for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

As assistant principal Rob Thomas sat onstage, dressed in a hazardous materials kind of suit, four students launched balls with two giant slingshots toward him. The object wasn’t to hit Thomas but to hit one of the targets next to him. After several shots, one of the balls hit its target, and the reaction was that a large tank above his head opened up and slimed him with applesauce.

It may seem silly, but if it makes learning physics more attractive to kids, Honeywell’s happy to make it happen.

“It moves more kids down the path,” said Mike Rowley, a vice president with Honeywell Aerospace. “The next wave of innovators is going to come from (these) kids.”

This story was originally published November 5, 2015 at 6:05 PM with the headline "Science + fun = learning."