Over Coffee® is on Thanksgiving week hiatus. Please enjoy this reposting of one of our top episodes of 2025!

Most people don’t put the words “engineering” and “fun” together in the same sentence.

But for Air Rocket Works Co-Founders Rick Schertle and Keith Violette, the two always go together.

With a shared passion for creating rockets and launchers, they first connected over some articles Rick wrote for Make Magazine.

Keith wound up sending Rick a working prototype of his compressed-air rocket launcher, which Rick describes as “the coolest thing ever”.

The rest is history.

The “launch” of a small business

Rick and Keith, who live in California and New Hampshire, respectively, have only seen each other in-person a handful of times: at maker fairs! But their small business, Air Rocket Works, has been capturing the imagination of kids and “big kids” since its founding in 2014.

And their air rockets, compressed-air launchers and free templates–including four contributed by NASA!–continue to be a hit.

“I’ve always wanted to include the fun side of engineering, and keep things interesting,” Keith says.

Inspiring the makers

While their products have a sense of joy built right into them, Air Rocket Works’ launchers and templates are also teaching kids–and “big kids”–a lot about science, technology, engineering, art and math.

Both Rick, who teaches at Steindorf STEAM Magnet School, and Keith, a mechanical engineer by profession, have implemented maker fairs at their local schools.

For Rick, a long-held dream of hosting a school maker fair ultimately led him to evolve the school’s traditional open house to a mini-maker event. With music, a rocket launch and maker stations, the event was a huge success, and grew proportionately. Rick says he thinks 2025 will mark their fourth year!

(Like to give a favorite maker or rocket enthusiast a gift they’ll enjoy? Here’s a link to Rick’s book “Planes, Gliders and Paper Rockets: Simple Flying Things Anyone Can Make” on Amazon!)

Meanwhile, while his own son and daughter were in school, Keith volunteered to teach engineering sessions. These involved building water rockets and doing rocket launches. After meeting other parents with similar engineering background, he and his wife Tanya organized a three-hour maker fair, with fifty exhibits, at the local high school, for students from first grade through high school.

“(We made) all kinds of just really fun hands-on things, to show that science, engineering and the arts all work well together,” he explains.

And both Rick and Keith want to keep right on creating cool “flying things”, teaching and inspiring kids (as well as big kids!) to explore, be confident and see themselves as makers.

Rick and Keith shared the story of Air Rocket Works, talked about some of their favorite experiences and discussed what they’d like to do next!

On this edition of Over Coffee® we cover:

• How “specializing in fun” led to Rick’s career path, as a maker teacher, entrepreneur and author;

• How Keith’s background enabled him to develop his talents for prototyping creative ideas, and led to his career as an inventor and mechanical engineer;

• The story of their partnership in their family-owned small business;

• What led Rick to create the air rocket launcher that started the whole thing!;

• Rick’s experience, exhibiting his creation at his first Maker Faire;

• How Keith came onboard, through his passion for making “cool stuff”;

• Rick and Keith’s experiences with their early collaborations;

• A “shameless plug” of some of the products on their website shop;

• How NASA Kennedy Space Center became intrigued and wound up contributing free templates!

• The “arts” aspect of what Rick and Keith are doing, with Air Rocket Works;

• Rick and Keith’s perspectives on starting their small business, and why it worked well;

• RIck and Keith’s advice to parents or educators who would like to implement maker festivals or activities at local schools;

• How you can get involved, if you’d like to!