The video on the left is what my tin foil boat looked like before I sank it with my pennies.
The video on the right is what my tin foil boat looked like after I sank it with 319 pennies.
This image is the design that my team came up with on tinkercad for a 3-D printed boat.
This image is what the final product of our 3-D boat looked like after it held 74 pennies.
Using tin foil I created a temporary boat to test different designs for a 3-D printed boat that would work well and hold a lot of pennies. I did this because with 3-D prints, it is important to have a stable design to support more than the 319 pennies that my tin foil boat held seeing as the printed boat is much thicker, stable, and will keep it's form.
During this process, I learned that the shape in which you build the tin foil is very important though it will float either way there are certain shapes that make it much stronger than others. The 3-D printed boat had a very similar concept, though it will float no matter what realistic hollow shape is used there are precautions that need to be taken to ensure that water stays out, and that the boat will hold as many pennies as possible.
The seven standards of the class are empowered learner digital citizen, knowledge constructor, innovative designer, computational thinker, creative communicator, and global collaborator. My project ties to innovative designer, as was global collaborator because I worked with a group of people to try and figure out the best design possible. I was an innovative designer because I came up with new, and different solutions to make the best boat possible.
A challenge that I overcame in the duration of this project for my tin foil boat was which shape to use, another thing that I had to stay aware of was that I was spreading the pennies evenly throughout the sinking to ensure that not one side of the boat would sink quicker than another. With the 3-D printed boat one of the main challenges was coming up with a design that had some sort of assurance of stability such as circular shapes surrounding the perimeter of the boat. To try and solve the issue of stability we and keeping the water out we built 2 inch walls and as well as the stabilizers previously discussed to ensure that we had a boat that would hold as many pennies as possible.
Given a chance to do this project again I would pay closer attention to the design during the revision process. In my group we failed to check the width of the walls so when we printed the design the walls were to thin to even be a part of the print. Due to that very severe design flaw going unnoticed the boat did not keep out near as much water as it should've.
The project connects to careers in engineering. The use of tinkercad during this project helped to teach us about the design process while designing a prototype. This also connects to careers in engineering because there were many different things that we had to consider before building it.
25 different boats:
Bass boat
Pontoon
Center console
Runabout
Fishing vessel
Dinghy
Sailboat
Skiff
Boat
Houseboat
Cabin cruiser
Personal watercraft
Walk-around
Inflatable boat
Ferry
Jet-boat
Kayak
Canoe
Bow rider
Jon boat
Rowing
Catamaran
sampan
narrow-boat
Yacht