Sustainable Design Challenge - Gravity Car

This is a project to make a gravity-powered vehicle. The vehicle can only be powered by gravity (weights) and cannot use any other energy source such as elastic rubber bands, mousetrap springs, or stored compressed air.

References:

Forum on Gravity Cars and Design Competition on Instructables.com Web Site

Building a Gravity Force Car on Science.com Web Site

Design Challenge: Build a Gravity Car to travel 20+ m in the 300 Building Hallway. Then, redesign the car adhering to the following Sustainable Design Principles:

• No adhesive fasteners (put the glue gun away)
• Design for Disassembly
• Plan to return/reuse all parts
• Aspire to performance equal to the Propeller Car your group built without the restrictions of Sustainable Design Principles

Build the sustainable design version of your gravity car from scratch. Keep track of your parts. The goal is to assemble the car, document it's performance with video and photos, then disassemble the car and return as many of the parts as possible back to the shelf.

This is a Group Project. But your Web Post is an individual effort. Be sure to reflect on how green design principles affected performance, build time, and amount of rework plus trial & error.

Ready for Demo Day: 0 or 10 points

Distance for your non-sustainable car

• 0 (< 2 m)
• 5 (2-10 m)
• 10 (> 10 m)
• 20 (> 20 m)

Distance for your sustainable car

• 0 (<50% of the distance of your sustainable car)
• 10 (50-99% of the distance of your non-sustainable car)
• 20 (100% or greater than the distance of your non-sustainable car)

Document Your Building Experience Using Sustainable Design Principles - web post should include side-by-side video showing the performance of both cars traveling down the 1st floor Hallway of the 300 Building (10 marks), 4 making photos, (10 marks) and a journal (IB Style - 3 themes/3 bullet items per theme) reflecting on Sustainable Design versus Conventional Design - 18 marks)

Document four (4) of the eight Innovation Rubric behaviors (for each instance, include at least two drawings, storyboards, and/or before/after pictures as supporting evidence of your Innovation Behavior and three supporting evidence bullets describing how you measured up to the Proficient description of the Innovative Behavior.