Funnest Swing Design

Evidence of Work

swing project

In this project, we were tasked, as the name suggests, to design the "funnest" swing. Firstly, yes, "funnest" is not technically a real word, but I digress. Before we could proceed, we had to decide what exactly made a swing fun. We concluded that a swing was more fun if it had a greater arc length. We then designed and performed all necessary calculations for a tire swing with a large arc length. We decided on a tire swing due to the added mass, as well as the fun that comes with spinning around.

Content

  • Period

    • T=2pi * (square root of L/g)

      • We needed to know how long each cycle was to calculate the frequency

  • Frequency

    • f=1/T

      • We needed the frequency to calculate the maximum velocity

  • Tension

    • F=ma

      • We needed to calculate the tension in the main chain, as well as the three lower small chains because it was one of the parameters of the project

  • Arc length

    • L=2pi(r) / A

      • By dividing the circumference of the would-be circle by the amplitude, we calculated how far the swing actually swings

  • Average velocity

    • V=L/0.5T

      • By dividing the arc length by half of the period, we found the average velocity of the swing, not accounting for the rotation of the tire.

  • Maximum velocity

    • Vmax=2pi(f)A

      • The maximum velocity is substantially different from the average velocity, because the velocity is greatest at the bottom of the arc

Reflection

During this project, I was working in a group of pretty different people, with very different attitudes and interests, neither of whom I've know previously. Therefore, as rare as it may be, I can put Character into the spotlight, as I would say I had to demonstrate some to work with almost complete strangers. Another strong point was Collaboration. My group worked well, but Gage and I especially were able to work well together to brainstorm ideas and complete calculations.

This project jumped from being completely subjective to simply picking arbitrary numbers and plugging them into equations. Therefore, Critical thinking was not as necessary as in others. It was there, of course, as with any project, just not in the capacity that other projects require. Also, while Communication between me and Gage was good, I feel that we may have unintentionally left Micayla out of some of the calculation process.