A former Farrer teacher, famous for launching rockets off the school oval with his students, has gone from staring up at the stars to winning the Prime Minister's Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Secondary Schools.

Matt Dodds turned a childhood spent camping out into a passion for teaching physics - with rockets.

"The rocketry task actually comes from a student that I taught at Farrer called James Sutter," Mr Dodds said.

He'd been teaching James kinematics - the study of moving objects.

"I thought it [would be] so much cooler if we actually built rockets and launched them."

The students designed the rockets in software first, calculating how long and high they'd fly, and then built and launched them.

James Sutter is now the lead structural engineer for Gilmour Space Techno

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