TWENTY of the finest new mathematicians from Queen Elizabeth’s School in Crediton gathered undaunted on a wild and blustery day in November to construct rockets.

The Year Seven students were given the raw materials: tape, card and colours. The point of the exercise was simple: build a rocket that could be fired from the launcher, with the sole aim of travelling the furthest horizontal distance.

The students surged into action, busily discussing design features and tactics. Gradually they came up with and tested their prototypes, fine tuning their efforts and trying to squeeze every extra metre out of their machines.

The unforgiving weather meant that they had to reconfigure the launch so that it was now pointing out of the maths classroom window. This gave a nice high launch pad.

There was still a gusty wind howling round the maths block, so a tricky task still lay ahead.

Eventually the test firing started. Mr Law was entrusted with pumping up the high pressure air launch.

The switch was then quickly tripped and with a satisfying bang, the rockets started shooting through the autumn air.

Eventually after many strong efforts there were two clear front runners.

One rocket made by the girl’s team screamed through the air at a terrifying pace, eventually hitting the ground at an amazing 40metre distance!

The other one had already marked itself out to observers after it nearly shot a hole in the ceiling during a test run.

In the window launch it went so far that it had to be fished out of a tree inside the nature reserve at the edge of the school grounds. Once it had managed a flight that came back to earth it posted an amazing 64metre distance.

Mr Blagden said: “Thanks to all the Year Seven students who tok part with enthusiasm and determination. It was great fun and gave us some memorable moments.”