Starlight Zippy and Girl Scouts rocketry project

Starlight's ZIPPY inspired me to offer to do a rocketry project for my daughter's Girl Scouts unit, which could include up to 30 Brownies and Girl Scouts. The troop leader was agreeable to the idea, so we're organizing it now.

Mr. Bob at Starlight was kind enough to allow me to order a couple of their National Rocketry Day "Zippy" kits as examples, so the Zippy seems like the perfect kit for both price and building experience.

I took some shots of the kits. My plan is to have my 8 year old daughter build one as a demo, so I can see how well the other girls will do with it, and adjust our teaching methods accordingly. The goal is to have the girls build them one week, and I'll take the Zippies home and spray paint them all white. (Unless the girls want to take them home and decorate their birds themselves.) Then I'll bring them back and the girls can decorate them the next week. The flight day is tentatively planned to be in the field next to the host school when the weather gets better, using A8-3s.

Zippy is an 18mm 3FNC slightly over 8 inches high, with a PNC, pre-cut balsa fins and streamer recovery. It looks like a great little rocket! One of the features that really surprised me was that the BT is pre-marked for the fin locations and launch lug. Grappling with how to efficiently have all the girls properly mark their BTs was a challenge I hadn't sorted out. Starlight kindly did that for me, and still kept the kit at $1.75! The sample I opened has a high quality 2-part PNC, cleanly cast. The shoulder fits into the cone very tightly, so only a tiny bit of glue should be needed to assemble it. Zippy is a minimum-diameter bird, and Starlight provides a yellow guide tube to set the engine block. The instructions are exceptionally well drafted, printed with clear, large drawings. A NAR membership flier is tossed in for good measure.

I really don't think anyone could do better for a teaching rocket than Zippy. This covers the basic assembly skills and materials challenge, and doesn't cheapen out with a plastic 1-piece fin can & a body wrap decal, which I really appreciate. And the price is amazing. Starlight really deserves some credit and gratitude for this venture.

I'll post more pics and info as the project progresses. Anyone have any suggestions for conducting the project? Is there a Girl Scouts merit badge applicable to rocketry?

I plan on collecting CD/DVD spindles at work to give the girls stands to use for assembly and display.

I have one girl in Junior scouts and another in Daisies. My wife is co-leader for our older daughter’s troop and I got asked to do the same thing. There is a badge, I think it was simply called the aerospace badge, but as I understand it, badges are slightly different and/or requirements to earn the badges are slightly different from one level of scouting to the next. The Junior Scouts had a list of possible activities to earn the aerospace badge, of which I think they had to do six. My presentation to them, their building and launching was only part of what they did to earn the badge. I don’t know everything they did, but some of the other things were eating astronaut food (freeze dried ice cream wasn’t as popular as I thought it would be), touring a model aviation museum, and learning about women astronauts.

How I approached my part was by downloading several of the educational resources available at the Estes and NASA websites (and a few others), and just kind of pulling little bits from here and there into the presentation. I had one 2 hour meeting with them to talk about the basics of rocketry and model rocketry, as well as to build rockets. I will say, what I thought I could go through fairly quickly took longer, so I kind of had to go into less detail on some parts of the presentation than I had planned. I was seriously concerned about building the rockets within an hour or less, so to save time and money, I went with having them build the Art Applewhite Girl Scout Qubits available for free download on his website (and made sure that they knew where the website was). Once the rockets were finished, I went through range safety and the procedures at a club launch. I also made sure I brought in some of my rockets for them to see.

A couple of weeks later, they met me out at a club launch, where I went over the rules and safety again, gave them all motors and igniters, and helped them prep their Qubits for flight. Out of the ten, we had really good flights with two of them. Judging by the squeals, they loved each and every flight. They stayed for a bit after all of theirs were launched to see some other rockets fly, but it was cold so they didn’t stay long.

I told my wife to give me more advance warning next time, so I can plan better and get some more traditional kits for them to build.

Thanks for the advice!

The troop leader ordered engines from the Scoutstuff.com sale, and will be ordering the Zippy kits soon as well. She also found the aerospace patch the girls can earn.

Looks like it's a GO!

My experience working with kids and rockets is that the single biggest problem is getting the fins on straight with a kid-friendly (i.e. PVA) glue. Strongly consider the purchase/construction of a fin jig or two, and be sure to read all the tips regarding gluing surface mount fins with PVA glue.

Going this route will turn a difficult task prone to frustration (even for adults!) into one that is nearly trivial.