Our car was a 40cm by 15cm piece of wood with CD wheels on either end. It used the elasticity of rubber bands a power source. It had a difficult design process. I was in charge, and I did not relay my ideas well enough to my other teammates. As a result, everyone got a slightly different picture our of what our car was. Thankfully, this was all sorted out in the first build day. Our only other big problem was that our car couldn't reliably go 5 meters. It often stopped just short. We were unable to fix this due to time restraints. We had 4 days to build the car, and another day to make our presentation and calculate the car's potential, kinetic, and thermal energy throughout it's journey.
Concepts used:
Spring constant: A measure of how easily a spring is compressed and expanded, this is calculated using K=F/d. It is measured in Newton Meters, and a higher number means it is harder to pull.
PE(Elastic): How much energy is stored in an expanded or compressed spring. It's formula is PE(Elastic)=0.5K(XX), where X=the distance moved by the elastic material. PE(Elastic) is measured in Joules.
I also used the velocity and kinetic energy formulas in this unit, which can both be found on the Rube Goldberg Machine page of this website.
Spring constant: A measure of how easily a spring is compressed and expanded, this is calculated using K=F/d. It is measured in Newton Meters, and a higher number means it is harder to pull.
PE(Elastic): How much energy is stored in an expanded or compressed spring. It's formula is PE(Elastic)=0.5K(XX), where X=the distance moved by the elastic material. PE(Elastic) is measured in Joules.
I also used the velocity and kinetic energy formulas in this unit, which can both be found on the Rube Goldberg Machine page of this website.
Reflections:
One thing I did well in this unit was ideas. When a problem came up, I was pretty good at finding a way around it, or at least tweaking others ideas so they worked. Another thing I did well was troubleshooting. I often was very good at seeing what actually caused our car to fail, and fixing it. What I couldn't see, either my teammates or Mr. Williams could. One thing I didn't do well on in this unit was leadership. I tried to step up my leadership on this unit, but since I can be bad at getting people to understand what I'm thinking, our group descended towards chaos. Luckily, this was all sorted out before it could get out of hand. Another thing I did poorly was the calculations. None of our calculations were wrong, but I made quite a few mistakes in the beginning. They were all caught, but it was still bad. Next unit, I will have to take the calculations a little more slowly.
One thing I did well in this unit was ideas. When a problem came up, I was pretty good at finding a way around it, or at least tweaking others ideas so they worked. Another thing I did well was troubleshooting. I often was very good at seeing what actually caused our car to fail, and fixing it. What I couldn't see, either my teammates or Mr. Williams could. One thing I didn't do well on in this unit was leadership. I tried to step up my leadership on this unit, but since I can be bad at getting people to understand what I'm thinking, our group descended towards chaos. Luckily, this was all sorted out before it could get out of hand. Another thing I did poorly was the calculations. None of our calculations were wrong, but I made quite a few mistakes in the beginning. They were all caught, but it was still bad. Next unit, I will have to take the calculations a little more slowly.