Team X Status Report 4

Team X Status Report!

Today was the day, the day of our egg drop! The level of confidence went down so much you couldn’t even see it. My whole group were so nervous because we have changed our design so many times that I definitely lost hope in the lander landing safely.

We went to science class very worried about not finishing our lander to the standards we expected. As soon as we put our books down we bought some tape and finished putting our lander together making sure it was as secure as we could get it. Then we went to to the bench in the hallway to drop our lander for our design test making sure that our control variables (such as who dropped it and the height of where we dropped it) stayed the same. After half an hour it was time to drop our egg!!! The first round you had to drop your lander from halfway up the stairs. As everyone started dropping their landers one by one it made me even more nervous and kind of lose hope because nobody’s eggs were surviving until Kaylin’s group and soon after Aadit’s group safely landed their landers. This didn’t ease my nerves because their landers were fancy straw ones with parachutes unlike ours was just a box with a parachute. Before we knew it, it was our turn to drop our lander. Three, two, one GO! There was nothing we could do anymore our lander was falling however, to our delight, it was falling fairly slowly. When it hit the bottom my heart sank because in my head the thud was louder then an explosion but in reality it was fairly quiet. Then we checked the egg to see if it had broken… IT HADN’T BROKEN!!!!!!!!!!!! No words could explain how I felt because all our hard work and stressed conversation worked, but that was wasn’t the end. We still had to make it through the second level, this was from the top of the stairs, three other groups had also made it that far. Just before we were about to start our parachute got tangled up and we were freaking out. Thankfully we were able to untangle our parachute and were able to drop. When we dropped our lander it did fall a little faster and that did scare me so much. When we checked if the egg broke, we found out… IT DIDN’T!!! Our lander did land the closest to the ‘X’ however we had the highest budget out of the three groups who made the drop. On Thursday we will drop our lander from the roof and hopefully it survives :)

I think the main reason why our lander landed safely was because of our parachute. We used a material (half a bin bag)that had a large surface area, which causes a lot of air resistance and a slow descent. This can be seen in our recording of the egg drop. If you want to know more about of egg drop journey check my other blog posts out (1, 2, and 3)

Team X Status Report 3

Team X Status Report

Today I was really proud of myself because I really stood up the the challenge and took charge for a while to really put forward my ideas. This lesson as a group we were able test our lander (unfortunately it didn't work) and made major improvements. For example we changed our parachute to plastic instead of tin foil. The most challenging part of the lesson was defiantly making the discussion together rid of the tin foil and add the plastic bag. The reason being is because our group was very concerned about our price and it hurt that we had to buy more things however, if we didn't change our idea then we would lose engineering points because we don't want our lander to break. I think our lander will be successful in landing on the ‘x’ but not breaking I’m not 100% about because I hope our parachute doesn't cause our lander to flip over and breaks our egg. I can't wait for the dropping because I just want this suspense of if our egg will break or not to

Team X Status Report 2

Team X Status Report

We learnt that air resistance is a frictional force against a moving object. For our lander to not smash into lots of pieces we needed to design our lander to have a wide surface area. This is because a larger surface area means more air resistance and the more air resistance the slower the lander will fall, decreasing the force at impact. We also learnt about potential energy and kinetic energy. At the beginning of our drop, just before we let go of our lander, there is 100% potential energy but as the lander drops the potential energy decreases and the kinetic energy increases until the lander hits the ground and all energy is transferred. So we designed our lander so that air resistance is at a high (by adding a parachute) and that our landing takes lots of the impact when it hits the ground (we added long straws attached to styrofoam peanuts.

So many things have gone well with our project such as our ability to constantly improve our design however, we have been quite slow with building and testing that it has caused us to come in a lunch to do some work on our landers. By filling out our design test we have learnt that tin foil is a good parachute because it slows down the fall however the problem is that tin foil is very fragile (tears very easily) and if you don't have a large area of the foil it will not slow down the fall as much. This is shown in a video linked below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcWA_44rpXI

Team X Status Report!

Team X Status Report!

Our first big science project of the year was to build a protective “case”for our egg, so that it doesn't break after throwing it off of different places around school. However, the challenge was to build it the quickest, most efficient and the cheapest way. When I found out who was in my group I was so excited because Jason and Jonah are both very smart, realistic and creative. Our ideas to make a protective case went from making a pyramid out of straws to a weird contraption with a parachute, landing “legs” and lots of tape. We came up with this idea after watching some “egg drop videos” (to get inspiration) and combining all of our ideas.

Our accomplishments of the day were definitely coming up with a clear idea, sorting out what we would buy and lowering our total cost. Our biggest challenges are building our project quickly and properly and making our protective case land on the “X”. Our goals for next week are to buy our materials and test our parachute and landing.

Our protective case.