Launching a meteorological rocket as an instructive object of computer simulation in the school informatics course

Abstract

Since the first Russian school textbook on computer science edited by A. P. Ershov and V. M. Monakhov came out in 1985, the subject of “Computer simulation and computer experiment” has been explored through the simulation of physical processes unfolding in time and accessible to direct observation in many textbooks on Informatics. For such processes, the idea of temporal discretization can be introduced visually with the help of the videotaping metaphor. Russian Informatics textbooks examined a small oscillation of a load on a spring, water flowing out of a cubic tank, a fall of a person without a parachute (“delayed jump”) in the atmosphere considering air resistance as well as the flight of a small object thrown by a person disregarding air resistance as physical processes simulated by computer programs. These examples are informative, but they do not contain any unobvious conclusions that cannot be reached without computer simulation. The article suggests a more attractive simulation object for the school Informatics course, namely the process of vertical takeoff of a one-stage rocket delivering scientific equipment to the upper air of the Earth and the adjacent near-Earth space. Such rockets are called meteorological. The proposed computer simulation object is good because computer experiments with a developed model make it possible to obtain new results. These include designing a rocket whose maximum lift height paradoxically grows with an increase in the payload as well as showing that the lift height of one-stage meteorological rockets could be significantly increased if we only learned to stop the rocket engine for a few seconds during acceleration.