Rocket Science Is Child’s Play at These Hands-on Summer Camps

At the age of 6, Tiger Francisco and Will Gugerty are rocket scientists -- at least for a day.

Poised at a parking lot launch site, hands behind their backs, they start their countdown. Five, four, three, two, one ... blast off. They each push a button, and their solid-fuel rockets, handmade by each child, ignite, whizzing into the sky at 70 mph and reaching about 200 feet before floating back to Earth hanging from parachutes.

Like Will and Tiger, the youngest rocket engineers at this science camp in Long Beach can’t even tie their shoes yet. But they will enter first grade this fall already understanding some basic principles of physics and space science.

The idea of the weeklong summer camp, called Science Adventures, is to make science fun. For many baby boomers, science class meant memorizing chemical formulas and the Latin names of human bones. But their offspring are shown how to conduct their own experiments. The premise is that children remember only 10% of what they hear but 70% of what they do.

Specialty day camps -- particularly those devoted to science and nature -- have been proliferating throughout South- ern California in recent years.

Boys and girls, some as young as 4, can spend their summers examining prehistoric fossils, feeding zoo animals, bird watching, studying ocean life, building roller coasters, creating chemical concoctions or designing electric airplanes.

Teachers say the camps are particularly important to a child’s education.

“In elementary school, science is only about 20 minutes a week, and for teachers who may be intimidated by science, growing a flower in food coloring may be it,” said Nancy Aoki, who taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 19 years before quitting to become a regional manager of Science Adventures.

Based in Huntington Beach, Science Adventures, run by Science Enrichment Services Inc., offers summer camps in 54 cities in Southern California. About 25,000 children a year attend the camps in five states. Since its inception 24 years ago, about 1 million kids have attended.

For $220 per week, children from kindergarten through sixth grade can get a taste of rocketry and space, archeology, flight science or robotics. In the rocket program, they learn about aerodynamics, Newton’s three laws, the solar system, constellations, the Mars rover and the life cycle of stars.

Several other organizations in Southern California offer similar science camps.

Aoki said the hope is that when those youngsters reach high school and college, they will remember that science is cool, not boring, and intriguing, not intimidating.

On a Friday in June, about 20 children, including Will, Tiger and two other friends from kindergarten at Long Beach’s Lowell Elementary School, capped their five-day space adventure in El Dorado Park by launching their model rockets in a parking lot at Harbor College in Wilmington.

Many of the parents came to watch during their lunch hour.

“I played with these rockets all the time as a kid,” said Tiger’s father, John Francisco, as he videotaped the event.

Francisco, who works at Boeing’s Long Beach facility, which builds airliners, said the rocket and space camp “ignites and propels the imagination of young children and possibly launches a future interest in aerospace.”

“Tiger was waking up before me in the morning and saying, ‘Hey, rocket school,’ which never happened in regular school,” Francisco said.

As a child, Will’s father, Steve Gugerty, got up before dawn to see the first manned Mercury launches in 1961 on TV. He vividly recalls watching astronauts take the first steps on the moon.

“It’s more important to have space camp now, for the kids whose experience of space exploration is more detached and aren’t caught up in the drama of the moon race as a lot of us old kids were,” he said.

As they awaited the launch, Francisco explained how the rocket worked to another child’s mother. Many of the parents, especially the mothers, said that after a week of camp, their children knew more about space and physics than they did. About 25% of the rocket campers are girls, Aoki said.

Will’s mother, Maria Gugerty, said science wasn’t promoted when she was a child. “My parents wanted me to do ‘girl’ things,” she said. “I would love to have been exposed to these types of programs as a child.”

How does the rocket work? “By pushing a button that triggers the engine. And the fins at the bottom make it go straight,” Will said.

When the child pushes the button, it sets off an electrical charge that ignites and heats up the engine. The second explosion pushes out the nose cone and opens up the parachute.

When a camper is upset because his or her rocket misfires or gets snagged in a tree, Aoki tells the tearful child that it’s all part of the scientific process. Real scientists and engineers make mistakes, too.

After a day at rocket camp, kids inform their parents that Jupiter has many moons, some bigger than planets, and that when craters form on Earth’s moon, chunks explode and fall to Earth, where they melt and form a substance called tektite.

In addition to their handmade foot-long rockets, the campers return home every day with backpacks brimming with things they made: a telescope, a clay model of the sun, a foam shuttle orbiter.

“It’s pretty impressive,” said Tiger’s mother, Jo Stephanie Francisco. Sharing a ride home, three of the campers, all about to enter first grade, were discussing meteorites. “And that was from just one day of camp, “ Francisco said.

After their successful launch, the children were beaming. To them, it was pure fun, not education. One 5-year-old veteran of zoo camp, dinosaur camp and sports camp said rocket camp was the best of all.

Tiger, however, withheld judgment, hoping that someday, someone will offer camp on a warship.