Physics Takes a Medieval Turn at SVHS

The Scotts Valley High School football field looked somewhat like the scene of a medieval battlefield on Friday as honors physics students took over the space to launch trebuchets.

The contraptions, essentially a type of catapult used to launch projectiles during the Middle Ages, ranged in height, style and distance they could launch the softballs being used. But they all had one thing in common–each inspired and excited the teams of students and taught them physics in an interesting way.

“They are taking measurements on the height and distant [of the ball] so they can calculate how fast the ball was going when it left the trebuchet,” teacher John Postovit said. “They are also figuring out what direction and angle the ball was going when it left. There is quite a bit of physics involved.”

The project is one that Postovit has been doing in his classroom for three years. The students, who break up into groups of about three to five, do all of the research themselves on how to build the trebuchets. Then they do the actual designing and building themselves. Postovit said the process takes about a month of planning and building, and ends with a friendly competition among the teams to see who built the machine that can launch the furthest.

“The other thing they get is actually building something. There are not many things left in high school where you actually build something,” Postovit said. “There’s no wood shop. There’s no metal shop. All of that is gone.”

Student Mackenzie Cook said he and his team were really looking forward to building the trebuchet after hearing about the project from students in last year’s class. His team went all out with the project, even coming up with a computer simulation of their trebuchet before building it.

“I really like hands on stuff and there was a lot of building and tweaking with this,” Mackenzie said. “The first time we launched it, we didn’t know what to expect. But it worked and we all jumped up and down.”

Mackenzie and his team, which included Arnoud Mols, Ricky Reksoatmodjo and Jared Clark built a machine that towered over the rest and launched a ball about 58.6 meters, or approximately 192 feet.

Student Brett Perry said he had a lot of fun with the project.

“We built ours out of scraps from our yards. Considering we spent no money, we’re really happy with how it turned out,” he said. “But we did it 10 times before today and not all were successes.”

For many of the students, it seemed that continually testing and tweaking was the route to success.

“When we were getting it done, we didn’t know how far it would go,” student Quinn Smith said. “We would measure once, twice, and then go buy more wood.”

Dan Cook, who along with his wife Kelli, was at the field to watch son Mackenzie and his team launch their trebuchet said that he saw a lot of passion in the team as they worked on the project.

“It’s exciting to see because that is not always what you equate to the learning process,” he said.

Kellie Cook agreed saying that the project has really engaged her son in physics and that Postovit is an amazing teacher.

“Whenever you have a teacher like him that is hands-on and out of the book, you just see magic,” she said.