Monday, May 23, 2011

Egg Drop Challenge - Iteration #1

30 Achievements


Weight 42.8g

1-3 Create a Sketch of possible solution

4. Use a decision matrix

5.List of Materials for build day

6.Plan for bringing in materials.-
I found the styrofoam ;While Austin planned to bring in the parachute material (tissue paper), and I was tasked wiith bringing in the string.

7.Material fit in Printer Box

8.Materials fit in shoe box

9-14. Weighs less than 50g
weighed 42.8g

15-19. Hit Bullseye

20-26. Egg didnt break/crack/spill

27. Describe using Alebra
28. Describe using Arithmetic
29. Describe using Geometry
30. Describe using calculus


5) What designs from your class did well? Based on the achievements you earned, how would you redesign your solution to score better? Be specific (sketches with labeling work well for this).
The parachute designs seemed to do the best. The parachute slowed down the egg enough to were the force of the landing wasn't enough to break the egg. If I had to redesign my project, I would try and shave off a few grams to try and get it under 25g and fit into an altoid box. I would have used only a parachute and made a harness with which to put the egg in. If we did this, im confident we would not lose any of our current achievements and we would have improved the efficiency of our design.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Glider Challenge

1.
Final Glider


2. Design Phase

1) The challenge is to create a glider using balsa wood and tissue paper. We have to make a glider that will hopefully glide the longest for the greatest amount of distance and most hangtime, if not both then it should do one of those things.

2) There are no rules to brainstorming. We went through all possible ideas and considered what would be the best approach to create the best design. We took ideas from the gliders around the class and we went online to look up ways in which the most efficient gliders are built, we then took these ideas to help create our own. Our idea was to create a glider with a short glider with long wings, angled up at 15 degrees and curved at the tips to reduce turbulance, then put two horizontal fins as well as one vertical fin. We ended not being able to to curve the wings because the wood would bend enough, also we ended up not being able to angle thie wings also, so we had to just put them flat, and we couldn't put a vertical wing because of lack of material.

3) Criteria: We had to use the material, the blasa wood and tissue paper, nothing else, and had to use glue and tape to stick things together, nothing else.

Constraints: The criteria really limited our creativity because we couldn't just use any material we wanted which limited what we could do.


4)

3. Test Phase

+
1.       Solid flight
2.       Ok distance
3.       Good wing hole

Outcomes to change
1.       Try to lengthen flight time
2.       Try to lengthen flight distance
3.       Try to decrease the size of the plane

?
1.       Short flight time
2.       Lack of controllable direction

Ideas
1.       Increase stability of the plane
2.       Decrease the size of the plane’s wings
3.       Increase amount of tissue paper


Our main goals for our glider our to increase the distance it can go and I think decreasing the wing size and using more tissue paper and trying to add stability to the wings are our main goals.
4. Performance and Improvements
Our glider did not perform very well at all, it dropped immediately and went backwards. I i think a lot of it had to do with the wings, the wings needed to be much shorter because they were to heavy and caught too much wind, the shape of the wings need to be changed because they weren't efficient, and lastly the wings were not supported right they were to flmsy. Also we needed to put on a vertical fin, that would have helped a lot.