Ping Pong Prediciment

In March 2022, our Journey project was to build an object that could get a ping pong ball from the top of the ramp into the Commons to get to a plate sitting at the bottom. We had 3 designs as a team, and we used 2. One was a dodecahedron that was scrapped because it, well... didn't work. Two designs made it to the finals: the slide and the car that we made. Sophia and Owen made the slide thing: I made the car. The car wasn't originally a car: it was a wheel thingy that worked okay. I added two Popsicle sticks in the front of it that allowed it to stay on the right path. It worked a lot better than expected. However, the sticks caused a lot of friction. So I just built two and it became a car. However, it moved really slow, like the last one.

But this gave us an unseen advantage. The slowness in the final challenge allowed it to stop right by the plate, which caused us to win.

The other teams were Mary and Andrew with... a gun, I guess, and Emma and Dan with a trebuchet. 

Here's the final designs in videos: the car on the left and the slide on the right.

CAR: https://youtu.be/GYaARMasgo4

SLIDE/RAMP: https://youtu.be/qyCvQAQesoo

And finally, a not very serious design that we just did for fun: https://youtu.be/nMDgB6g4uV8

It was a lot funner than I thought it would in the beginning.