Description

Our groups theme was the Ocean. We based our entire project off of water and fish. To show our theme, we painted our board blue with waves and fish on top. We also stuck to the ocean theme with our ending, which was a fishing net being lifted.

We created a machine that would complete the simple task of pulling up a net of fish. All you had to do was start up the fan. The rest of the machine was mostly self-functioning, starting with the car knocking down the golf ball, to the dominoes falling over, to end up raising the pulley with the net of fish. We presented our project by first describing our project and showing the audience all of its major components. We presented them with all of our necessary measurements (Mass, PE, KE, etc.). We then ran our board.

Major Components

Velocity

The first major component in our project was velocity. Velocity is found by dividing the distance it covers by how long it took to do so. For example, our platform with the car on it was .445 meters long, and it took the car 1.43 seconds to cover the distance. This means its average velocity was .311 m/s.

Acceleration

The second major component in our project is acceleration. Acceleration is the change in velocity over time. To get the acceleration, you divide your velocity by the time again. So the acceleration of our car was .211 m/s/s.

Force

The third major component in our project is force. Force is defined on the amount of push or pull on a certain object. To find the force, you multiply the object's mass with its acceleration.

Work

The forth major component in our project is work. Work is the amount of energy put into something. To calculate the work you multiply the force an object is putting in and the distance. The car took .25 newtons to push, and it got pushed over a distance of .45 meters. The equation would look like this; W=(.25N)(.45m). This makes the total work done by the fan .1125 Joules.

Potential Energy

The fifth major component in our project is potential energy. Potential energy is calculated by how high the object is. Potential energy is also called "Potential Energy" because the object hasn't started it's motion, meaning the energy has not been created. The equation for potential energy is Mass multiplied by the acceleration of gravity multiplied by the height of the object. For example, golf ball had a potential energy of 11.27 Joules.

Kinetic Energy

The sixth major component in our project is kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is the amount of energy a given object has due to its motion. The way you find your kinetic energy is to divide the objects mass by 2, and multiply that by its velocity squared. After doing these calculations with our golf ball, it was found that our golf ball had a kinetic energy of 3.6728 Joules.

Mechanical Advantage

The seventh major component in our project is mechanical advantage. Mechanical Advantage (Real) is the amount of times a machine makes something easier. Mechanical Advantage (Ideal) is the amount of distance more that you have to push because of using a tool. The equation for Mechanical Advantage (Ideal) is Distance (Load) divided by Distance (Effort). This is the type of mechanical advantage we used as it was easier to measure the distances. Our wheel and axle had a mechanical advantage of 1.48.

Reflection

As our first project in STEM, I believe there were a multitude of things our group could have done much better. There were also quite a few things that would have made our project much better, but we didn't think of until it was too late.

I learned a lot about myself in this project. The first thing I learned about myself is that I need to learn how to be in a non-leadership role. During our project, I tried to assume a leadership position, but I was quickly sot down by a teammate of mine. For the rest of the project, I felt out of place. The second thing that I improved on was just getting started each day. At the beginning of the project, I would always be sluggish at the beginning of work time, thus taking away from the amount of time for work each day. But by the end, I improved and would always get on it right away.

The first of these things is that we made our board sit flat on the table. We were only two groups who did this, and I can clearly see why. There was no point in making our board flat, and all it did was make the entire project take twice as much work, and twice as much time. Making our board flat made it take so much longer only because if we had made it vertical, we would have built in height. If we had the height from the start, we wouldn't have had to spend our first couple of days building supports. The second thing we could have done better was time management. This was a huge issue none of us even noticed. This was really only a relevant issue for the first few build days. Our problem was occurring when we only had one thing we wanted to get done that day. This created an issue because we could not all be working on it at once. What would end up happening is that one person was actually working on that part while the other two just watched. The third and final major issue we had was communication of ideas. We all had separate ideas from the start, but some of these we didn't communicate. A lot of our board was just one person saying lets do this, no wait lets do this, while the other two just let them do whatever. If everyone had communicated there ideas, maybe our board would have worked better