EAST MANATEE, Florida USA — About 50 faces turned to the sky every few minutes Friday on the Braden River High School football field, where Haile Middle School students one at a time launched model rockets.

It was the first "public" launch for Haile eighth-grader Alex Kroll. The 12-year-old had launched rockets with her class before but never in front of so many strangers.

Besides the 41 seventh- and eighth-grade advanced technology students, teachers, parents and Braden River students gathered in the end zone.

The kids completed a preliminary launch shortly after noon after spending a couple of hours building rockets. During school one day, Haile's students will complete a real launch, and its top rocketeer will go on to compete in the Reach for the Stars model rocket competition in Coalwood, W.Va., during author Homer Hickam's October Sky Festival.

Braden River students also assembled rockets Friday but didn't launch them, and one of them will represent the school at the festival.

Seniors Cameron Collins-Evans and Chase Wolford, both officers in the high school's Technology Student Association, said they enjoyed helping the younger students with their rockets.

"It's good to see younger kids interested in what I'm interested in," said Cameron, 17.

Chase, also 17, wishes he had similar opportunities in middle school so he could have started learning about technology a couple of years earlier.

This is the first year Haile has worked with high school students, and the younger students have been given a gift, said Justin Erickson, their technology teacher.

"It's a great learning experience for the kids to see the programs they can go into," he said. "This is stuff they wouldn't normally do in a classroom."

It's cool to see what different technology can do, said 13-year-old Patrick Coleman, a Haile eighth-grader.

Patrick explained how he and his classmates constructed their silver-and-red rockets: They attached fins to a base, then connected the body to the base and inserted a shock cord for the parachute before adding a pointy tip.

Braden River engineering teacher Gil Burlew instructed the middle-schoolers on how to pack and launch their rockets before the group went outside.

On the goal line of the school's football field, Haile students three at a time positioned their rockets through a wire and onto makeshift launch pads, then one at a time blasted off after a countdown.

The first rocket landed 13 steps from the goal line. The object of the launch, Erickson said, was for a chute to land as close to its rocket's starting point as possible, assessing wind and other conditions before positioning it.

When a rocket launches, its tip should stay connected to its parachute, which should deploy, Patrick said. His tip and chute landed past the 20-yard line, and afterward he held his spent rocket upside down and told a classmate, "Aw, dude, look at the end. It's burned black!"

After counting down from five, Alex pressed the button to launch her rocket and saw it soar, then watched as her parachute floated toward Earth and into the end zone.

Alex is one of a handful of girls in Haile's technology class. Though Alex's ultimate goal is to dance on Broadway, Burlew said more girls are going into technology because they're seeing success in it and the industry's looking for interested women.

With a teaching philosophy of "hands-on, minds-on," he said it's an honor for him to see students succeed.

"Do they look like they're having fun?" he asked, indicating the students around him. "We make learning fun."

Copyright © 2007, Bradenton Herald.