Rocket making for clever clogs at the Royal Institute

This weekend, my little girl turned eight, and with her older brother away with school for the weekend, my role is starting to feel less like a parent and more like a friend-come-financier than anything more authoritative. But, with her two best friends staying for a sleepover, I fell back into educator mode with an activity schedule that aimed to please a rather more systemising crowd than most, when even their parents will admit they’re all a bit nerdy.

Rocket making at the Royal Institute felt like a perfect solution after Grandma Kat bought Ava membership for her birthday, with a workshop running over her birthday weekend. And wanting to start getting our money’s worth, we’ve already signed up for the Christmas Lectures–  although Ava’s still too young to go. If she wins a place, which is allocated by ballot to junior members over 11, she’ll have to let Jonah, who turns 11 this January, go in her place.

Perhaps, on the back of what we learned from the family rocket-making workshop, aimed at 7-11year olds, it won’t be such a bad thing. I turned up with Ava and her two friends, all of whom, till this weekend, were seven. These are kids any teacher would call “bright”. Ava’s maths has left her teachers gobsmacked – particularly, I sometimes think to myself, “for a girl”. Her two friends, which she’s had s close relationship with since nursery, also sit some way along the clever clogs spectrum – one, a quiet lad with a penchant for sighing deeply and setting you straight on the facts, and another, more exuberant child, whose passion is art and claims to dislike science, but could tell me exactly how acid reacts with alkaline to release carbon dioxide and thus fuel an explosion. Like me, however, he has a concentration span that’s overtaxed much beyond the 45-minute mark. This was a two-hour workshop, the first half of which delivered by rocket scientist (young, female) in an albeit inspirational powerpoint presentation on her role in satellite quality, went above even my 35-year-old head.

Of course, there was the token kid whose hand would shoot up to answer a question on Newton’s third law (every action creates an equal and opposite reaction, apparently), or exactly what model of rocket was flashing up on the screen. But the level of expected knowledge was quite high for the age group at which this workshop was aimed. Rocket specialists we ain’t, and this perhaps showed when it came to the build too – the second half of the workshop, after a sooped up demonstration of the old Mentos vs Coke trick, was to design and build your own ballon rocket that could carry three marbles the furthest.

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With a mild hangover and zero qualifications in design technology, having Tom on our team would have perhaps worked to our advantage. But alas, he was at home ironing (the cleaner didn’t have time this week apparently), having spent Friday night baking and Saturday morning decorating this years’ birthday creation, a pug cake. 

So it was up to me and the kids to cobble together a workable rocket. To be fair, the result was far more down to the ingenuity of the kids than myself, although my lack of skill with sellotape and scissors was what ultimately led to our coming last in the competition, after our rocket fell apart at approximately one-metre post take-off.

Undaunted, we headed down to the small museum in the basement of the institute where they played a hi-lar-ious game of period table singalong (they loved it),before wending our way back to Mile End for burgers at Greedy Cow which left us too full even for pug cake.

To balance the intellectualism, the kids rounded off the night with a home viewing of Chicken Run on Netflix and thankfully fell asleep by 9 pm, which is just as well as they were screeching and jumping on the ceiling by 7.20 a.m exactly. So much for not feeling much like a parent anymore!