Billie Brand's Digital Portfolio
Trebuchet
For this project, we had to create a trebuchet of our own design with features resembling a location and time period
My group's location and time period for our trebuchet got decided on as Medieval Ireland. It's represented with the supports looking like castle towers and the counterweight being a jumble of rocks.
During this project, I feel that I best demonstrated collaboration by including all my group members and keeping everyone on track and on the same page. A lot of our group members were gone on different days and this would have caused a lot of trouble if we didn't have good collaboration and communication.
I feel that my critical thinking could be improved considering that we encountered a lot of obstacles that could have been handled a lot more efficiently. When our counterweight broke off of our trebuchet in the middle of testing we took a lot of time arguing about what to do.
Rube Goldberg
During the Rube Goldberg Project, there were many trials and obstacles that we had to overcome as a group. In the second step,
a ruler is attached to a wheel and a ball is pushed down the ruler, and as it gradually goes down the inclined plane, it gains
momentum and falls into a bucket. The final step used two simple machines; at first, a piece of cardboard holding up a scalpel was knocked away and the scalpel fell and acted as a wedge to cut the fishing line. The second simple machine in that step is a pulley that is used when the fishing line is cut to release a weight and raise a flag. The ball falling into the bucket at the beginning of the Rube demonstrated inertia by pulling down the bucket and raising the block. The very first step uses momentum when the poker is released and swings on the rope to hit the ball. The third step uses speed when it has to zip down the ramps to reach the bottom tube.
If you drop a 7.0 grams steel ball 50 centimeter into a tiny bucket and try to calculate the velocity, you will run into a lot of conversions. First I had to convert 7g into kilograms and get 0.007, then turn 50 cm into 0.5 meters. I took my converted numbers and multiply them together to get 0.034335 then combined the units together to get joules in order to get the potential energy. The next step includes the velocity of the steel ball as 45cm/s. I needed to convert the centimeters to meters and get 0.45. Then I took the mass, 0.007 kg, and multiplied it by the velocity squared, 0.2025 m2/s2. I then divided it by two to complete the equation for kinetic energy and got 0.00070875 Joules.
When we started designing our Rube Goldberg machine, everyone had their own ideas that were for the most part unachievable and completely different from everyone else. We had to take a step back and review everyone’s plan and then piece together parts around concepts. I mostly designed the whole layout because I was the only one willing and everyone went off of what I sketched down. A lot of our group members were gone or didn’t work so we had to cut out some of their steps in order to finish in time. My greatest area of strength in this project was critical thinking, when I ran into an issue with my step, it was backwards from the rest of the steps, I talked with my groupmate about what we could do and I decided on taking out all the parts and switching them around. The area I grew most in this project was the collaboration; even though I started out and for a long time just worked on my own with my own step, when Sam stepped up and brought everyone together, I started talking with people and helping them figure out their steps.
