DESIGN BRIEF
The Fling Machine challenge was simple. You must send a ping-pong ball as close to ten feet away from the launch pad as possible. It doesn't matter how it gets there as long as there's the least possible human interaction.
OUTCOME
I got partnered up with Addison Matthews. Together, we came up with the idea of a popsicle stick catapult. It was easy to build, inexpensive, and effective. After constructing a prototype and collecting data, we knew we struck gold with our design.
MAJOR TAKEAWAYS
-My big takeaway with this project was teamwork. Addison and I stayed focused throughout the project and ended up scoring very high in both our project presentation and our testing.
-Another takeaway I had was taking solid data is very important. Our catapult had the best average in the class. When we presented this data, it was hard for other students to say our catapult wasn't as good as theirs because our data made our catapult look better.
The Fling Machine challenge was simple. You must send a ping-pong ball as close to ten feet away from the launch pad as possible. It doesn't matter how it gets there as long as there's the least possible human interaction.
OUTCOME
I got partnered up with Addison Matthews. Together, we came up with the idea of a popsicle stick catapult. It was easy to build, inexpensive, and effective. After constructing a prototype and collecting data, we knew we struck gold with our design.
MAJOR TAKEAWAYS
-My big takeaway with this project was teamwork. Addison and I stayed focused throughout the project and ended up scoring very high in both our project presentation and our testing.
-Another takeaway I had was taking solid data is very important. Our catapult had the best average in the class. When we presented this data, it was hard for other students to say our catapult wasn't as good as theirs because our data made our catapult look better.
Above is our prototype for the project. It proved semi-accurate but very imprecise.
Below is our final project. It was incredibly accurate, boasting an average of 10.02 feet.
Below is our final project. It was incredibly accurate, boasting an average of 10.02 feet.
Below is our project presentation
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