Natalie Chellis limps back to her starting point with a sigh. It’s hard to tell if the tests of her home-made catapult for science class are working out. On the one hand, her little binder-clip device  throws things plenty far, but on the other, it throws them plenty high, too.

“It keeps hitting the lights,” Chellis told teacher Nancy Kinsella-Johnson Wednesday, during the sixth grade science class at Twin Falls Middle School.

“It” was a candy Dot, that didn’t do any damage.

Several classmates were working with Chellis in the commons, in the sixth grade hallway, and outside on teacher Kyle Wallace’s patio area, testing their catapult creations.

“I’m raising the angle to see if it affects how far it goes,” said Morgan Kaye.

“I’m increasing the mass,” said Ana Jacobson, indicating a plastic box filled with small objects. She’s testing her device inside, because it’s small enough.

Outside, Jackson Reece, Lucas Costello, Cameron Ferreri and Tyler Kinnaman were fighting the wind, which tossed their notebooks around with every gust, but didn’t seem to have much effect on the stuff coming out of the catapults. It made for inconclusive results.

“We wanted to see if changing the mass of the object changed the distance,” explained Ferreri.

For teachers Wallace and Kinsella-Johnson, it was all a success.

“This is one of my favorite units,” said Wallace, “because of the creativity of the students.”

Rubber bands and bungee cords were fairly standard tools for most catapult manufacturers, but there were a few unusual materials. Reece used a trampoline spring for his. Caden Davis modified his Erector set for the task. Colby Boonstra used flexible arrow shafts to provide his propulsion.

And all of them, no matter what they were testing, paused to scribble their results.

The lesson was clear. As Wallace told his students at the start of class, “You’ve got to be scientists, guys!”

Morgan Kaye works with Caden Davis to test his milk-carton-based catapult during science class at Twin Falls. The boys didn’t have a tape measure, but solved the problem by lining up yard sticks in the hallway.

A mandarin orange blurs through the air, launched from the Ferreri-Kinnaman catapult collaboration.

Students set up in hallways throughout Twin Falls Middle School to test their catapults, inventions in sixth grade science class to explore aspects of physics, as well as the investigative writing process.

Ian McDonald helped classmates measure how far their home-made catapults could launch ping pong balls, small toy figures, and even candy Dots, during a day of experimentation at Twin Falls Middle School.

Student-made catapults line the floors and counters of Kyle Wallace’s science classroom at Twin Falls Middle School. Students could build the throwing devices individually or as teams, and they spent several days of class testing their creations and documenting the results.