On November 4th and 5th, about 125 students from local high schools came to Northeastern University for NEPTUN. Northeastern volunteers compiled their own curriculum and created courses that students were able to sign up for prior to the event. In total there were thirty three different courses offered, many of which having multiple sections. Some of these classes included Creating a Killer: Criminal Psychology, Are You Smarter Than an MIT Professor?, Climate Change And You: Surviving the Slow Apocalypse, and This is Your Brain on Drugs.
I ran eight sections of the course “Designing, Simulating, and Optimizing Rockets!” The class was focused on teaching the basics of rocketry, rocket design, and motor selection before delving into a free open source program called OpenRocket. Students quickly learned the ropes and started making their own creations and improving upon them depending on the test flight simulation data.
