Forces and Friction: Star Wars Edition

I've got a few students in my room who are obsessed with anything and everything Star Wars...This past weekend I located some Star Wars graphics on Scrappin' Doodles and because I constantly ask Bennett to do his Chewbacca and R2D2 voices {at least 5 times a day} I decided it was appropriate to make a forces & friction lesson ASAP! I located some Star Wars figures from Toys 'R' Us...I was unsuccessful locating R2D2 and C3PO, even after going to 3 different stores...We'll just do without them for the time being.

I divided my class into small groups. Each was given some drinking straws, a ruler, a recording sheet (downloaded FREE from our TpT Store), and of course...a Star Wars figure! Students determined how many straws it took to move their character one inch and then five inches in various locations of the school. The more straws that were used (force) made the characters go further. When we ventured outside to take our measurements on the sidewalk, blacktop, and in the grass we also had another variable that made it more difficult...the wind!   

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My students are curious to find out if the diameter of the straw has any effect on the amount of force that is applied...and a few of my students are going to engineer some "wind barriers" to see if we can prevent the wind from blowing our characters over! We will go back tomorrow and revisit this...as I will also be making some changes to the actual template that I created. Feel free to take a looksie at the original template on TpT! Here are some of pics from today: