For this Project we had to make a small car that ran of an alternative energy system. The car had to go 5 meters and cary 100 pennies or a mass of 250 grams. The main goal was to get the car as close to 5 meters as possible in the shortest amount of time. For are first car design was a rat trap car. That idea didn't work out well because the rat trap snapped down to fast making it very hard to control. Next we decided to simplify are design by attaching a rubber band to one side and wrapping the rubber band around the axil. This model works a lot better than the first it went at about 5 meters within a few try's.
As you can tell in are presentation we had a lot of fun with it. Are whole car was powered by spring potential energy (on slide 4) Because the rubber bands where acting as a spring on the car we needed to find the spring PE using the equation PE=1/2kx^. On the 5th slide we graphed the energy of the car. The orange line was the total energy the reason it never changed is because energy is not created or destroyed. The blue line represents the PE the reason it gets smaller and smaller is because the rubber band was stretching out leaving less room for energy. The green line represents the thermal energy the reason this grows is because all PE lost goes to thermal because the energy is lost to friction or heat. The red line at the bottom was the KE and the KE was always very small. One the next slide, slide 6 it shows a graph that compares velocity and time the graph spikes up because at 1.5 seconds it is going the fastest. It slows down so much because it runs out of rubber band. On the other graph it shows the time and meters this graph increases because for the first 5 meters is always moving.
On this project I felt like I could have improved on being open to other peoples ideas and working styles there where sometimes throughout this project where I noticed that I was shutting down some peoples ideas. I can Improve by trying to listen more and try out there ideas. One other thing I felt like I could do better would be to make my work fun instead of having work and fun be separate things this way I can enjoy myself more during class and be more productive.
On this project I felt like I did a good job of making sure every one had a job and where doing it correctly One other thing I feel I did well on was the groups presentation. I felt like the presentation was lively and entreating to watch.