Launch!

Honors Physics Students Test Rockets in Preparation for National Contest

BY DARRYL GANGLOFF

THE HOTCHKISS CLASS OF ’49 FIELDS recently acted as the launch site for flying rockets that soared hundreds of feet into the sky. The event marked the inaugural test flights for four teams of honors physics students who are competing in the national American Rocketry Challenge—the world’s largest rocket contest.

“The goal is to fly a single egg inside the payload of the rocket to an altitude of 850 feet. The section containing the egg has to stay aloft between 42 and 45 seconds,” physics instructor Dr. Jeffrey LaCosse told a small crowd that gathered for the event. “And the egg has to be intact.”

One by one, the four teams set up their rockets, counted down, and pushed the launch button on a controller. The rockets shot into the air, separated into two sections, and glided back down on parachutes.

Emily Iorio ’23 and Brayden Li-Kato ’24 said their rocket went 480 feet high. They were immediately thinking of ways to improve their model for the next test flight, such as redistributing weight to make it more balanced. Both students are enjoying this project and the chance to compete at a national level. “It’s really exciting. I have wanted to do stuff like this, but I’ve never known how to. It’s fun to be able to learn about rockets in class,” Emily said.

The honors physics students will continue to test and tweak their rockets throughout the winter, culminating in qualifying flights in front of a judge after spring break. The top 100 teams from these qualifiers will attend the national finals near Washington, D.C. The winning team will be awarded $20,000 and head to Paris to compete in the world championships. H

Brooks Clifford ’23 Published in Highly Selective History Journal

BY NANCY SOMERA

BROOKS CLIFFORD ’23 HAS BEEN published in the winter issue of The Concord Review, the only quarterly journal to publish academic history papers of secondary students. His paper on political cartoonists was one of 11 chosen for the highly selective journal that only prints about 5 percent of the essays it receives from students around the world.

Brooks came up with the topic for his paper during his sophomore year at Bronxville High School in New York, where he researched the masked messages behind the cartoons and children’s books of Theodor Seuss Geisel—better known as Dr. Seuss. “I found the research and creation of the project to be a really fun and interesting process, as I found it intriguing how an entire nation and many generations could be greatly influenced by media such as political cartoons and children’s books,” he says. At Hotchkiss, he was given the opportunity to research any topic for Thomas Drake’s U.S history class last year. He knew he wanted to go into more depth on this topic. “It was where I came up with the idea of comparing Dr. Seuss to another historically famous political cartoonist, Thomas Nast,” he says.

Upon hearing about The Concord Review, Brooks was eager for the challenge to write for it. He spent the summer editing his paper and made many changes, the most significant coming when he learned The Concord Review doesn’t publish images. His original paper was conceived as a project dealing with visual sources. Drake, the Class of 1938 Teaching Chair and history instructor who acted as a sounding board for Brooks, explains, “His final essay for the course included about a dozen reproductions of cartoons; indeed, they were essential to the paper. Only when we were preparing the submission did we realize that The Concord Review does not publish images!”

Undeterred, Brooks rewrote the paper and finished with a 32-page piece that focuses more on the entire lives of the writers and how their values affected their writing, the technologically opportune periods they lived in, and the effect their types of media had on the American population. “He approached the added work over the summer with undiminished enthusiasm,” says Drake. “And in the process, he refined the analytical component—the analysis of continuity and change—significantly.”

Brooks praises many at Hotchkiss for their guidance. “Mr. Drake was an amazing help throughout the entire process, from showing us the benefits of citation tools, specifically Zotero, to giving us a great framework and detailed process through which we were able to conduct interesting and detailed research,” Brooks says. “In addition, the resources offered by Hotchkiss, from the teachers who are more than willing to help students accomplish their goals, to the librarians who were there for my many questions about citations and helped me find helpful and interesting sources, were all amazingly helpful in guiding me throughout my research process.” H