IN THE CLASSROOM:Teacher makes physics fun

Kim Esquivel soaked her teacher with a water balloon last December, but she didn’t get in trouble for it. In fact, she got a good grade.

The eighth-grader at Costa Mesa Middle School had joined her classmates in the Water War, an event put on by her honors science teacher to introduce the class to motion and forces. The teacher, Ed Bell, sat on a lawn chair in the middle of the football field and invited students to fire water balloons at him out of launchers — in part to learn about physics, and in part just to get it out of their systems.

Kim, 13, said her team nearly scored a direct hit.

“We came so close,” she said. “We got his leg.”

Bell, who has taught at Costa Mesa Middle School for five years, will do just about anything to make science entertaining. He has a second Water War scheduled for June, but on Tuesday, his class retired the balloons and let fly the marshmallows instead.

On an overcast morning with a strong southwesterly wind blowing, Bell led his students to the blacktop outside with plastic shooters from the Marshmallow Fun Co. The Tallahassee, Fla.-based company provided Bell’s class with 40 shooters and 120 additional magazines to help unravel the mysteries of projectiles.

The students got in groups of three, with one member pulling the trigger, another measuring distance and a third measuring time. The shooters used protractors to fire the marshmallows at different angles, and also tested how the candies traveled when shot behind and against the wind.

At the end of the period, Bell subjected himself to another round of abuse: He stood in the middle of a circle and let his students unload their magazines on him.

“When I was in school, science was always boring,” he said later. “My attitude is, if I can experience it and it’s fun, that’s how I’m going to learn.”

The marshmallow shooters are only a few of the devices that Bell uses to teach students about velocity. His students also use machines in the classroom that fire marshmallows past a pair of motion detectors — with timers that calculate speed down to 1/10,000th of a second.

On Tuesday, most of the marshmallows landed on the blacktop, but the students had gotten their fill a while back. Eighth-grader Rex Ranieri, 14, said Bell let the class try out the shooters on the blacktop last month and left the meter sticks behind.

“Everyone was shooting at random, and we were trying to catch them in our mouths,” Rex said.