OK so maybe we aren't yet done with our container that we (4th period Science {especially}: -MG [A.K.A. Mg- beautification department], Eleanor [moral support/parachute person], Luke [lid and structural support], Madeline [official duct-tape-cutter], me, Christian [backup tennis-ball cutter/throwing team], Mr. Harrelson [official Tennis-ball cutter], and Elizabeth [camera lady]*) would like to send up into space. I believe that our attempt went wrong when we filled the container with stuffed (FAKE!) animals. To be specific: squirrels. Today Georgio (the Italian modeling squirrel), Connor Jr., and Reed the squirrel went up into the air in the new gym and down. They risked their padded tummies and tails to protect the Flip camera, and for that we thank them.
The only problem was that a ball of red yarn (more padding) got in the way of the Flip camera's lens so we opened the container and fixed the problem [by removing the thread]. However sometime during that transaction the camera turned off AND did not record...
*Note that Team Fluffy has joined us in our efforts.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Tuesday...
Wear a blue shirt Tuesday to support the uncommon mindset of a peaceful global community!
Weather Balloon in Space!
In honor of our collection of persistent 8th grade science classes, and out goal of sending a weather balloon into space I have changed the background of this blog (again.) Thanks to National Geographic, one-of-the-best-resources-on-the-web, for the awesome picture.
Pine Cones, Tennis Balls, and Clorox Wipes?
So it's been a while since it was assigned, but as for what I did Wednesday and Thursday in Science Class:
It all started with a simple dream I had Tuesday night. Looking back on it I think it had something to do with my dog and I playing fetch with pine cones that afternoon but anyway, that night I had a dream in which I was watching pine cones fall. Their odd rounded conical shaped torpedoed to the ground, yet the seeds inside stayed intact. This dream inspired me in more than one way, in one way it made me open my eyes to the facts: over the past 100 or so years scientists have turned to the natural world around them when they were stumped. It's the truth.
When the Wright brothers built their first plane they looked at how birds fly or glide through the sky. When engineers they design speedy-sports cars nowadays they look at how Cheetahs' sleek bodies move over their terrain. So with that in mind Wednesday morning I went out in my backyard and studied a few pine cones.
In case you have never seen a pine cone before, the design is simple but effective. Pine cones are basically a rounded bullet-like shape with lots of holes and crevices on the outside, like a golf ball. On one MythBusters episode they did likewise to a car:
They found that it made a minuscule difference to it's fuel efficiency, but it did make a difference. In the end they compared a golf ball to a regular rounded ball and explained the aerodynamics were different.
So based on that information what did I do Wednesday and Thursday?
Why I dimpled our container design of course!
After asking my classmates where I might find tennis balls- Mary Grace, Nora and I headed to the tennis courts where we then got on our hands and knees and (very glamorously) crawled under the bushes where we found the tennis balls.
Please allow me to explain something before I continue: we did not know that what we were doing was "wrong," by the looks of the area under the bushes (full of prickly vines and leaf debris) no one had collected the tennis balls for years. But even then we didn't take them all! We took a few, yes, but there are still countless others buried under years of decaying leaves. And as for any of the Tennis coaches who may read this in the future: you can have them back! I only used about four-or-so and most of those I used were gray from use and sun-bleaching. Feel free to take back the others that were not used.
Anyway back to business:
I chose tennis balls for the substance I would use to cover the container with for quite a few reasons. One was that tennis balls are basically invincible. (Like my classmates and I learned latter on when we tried [with no avail] to cut them open.) Another was that their rubbery shell would absorb some of the shock from our container's impact with Earth. The last was that tennis balls are simply amazing. They are the only balls that come to mind when I think of neon-colored sports gear and they are incredibly durable.
So had you been in my 4th period science class Wednesday and Thursday you would have watched this idea of mine come to life before your eyes. You would have also probably laughed as you watched 8th graders try to cut tennis balls in half with safety scissors and duct-tape them onto an barely distinguishable Clorox Wipe container.
It all started with a simple dream I had Tuesday night. Looking back on it I think it had something to do with my dog and I playing fetch with pine cones that afternoon but anyway, that night I had a dream in which I was watching pine cones fall. Their odd rounded conical shaped torpedoed to the ground, yet the seeds inside stayed intact. This dream inspired me in more than one way, in one way it made me open my eyes to the facts: over the past 100 or so years scientists have turned to the natural world around them when they were stumped. It's the truth.
When the Wright brothers built their first plane they looked at how birds fly or glide through the sky. When engineers they design speedy-sports cars nowadays they look at how Cheetahs' sleek bodies move over their terrain. So with that in mind Wednesday morning I went out in my backyard and studied a few pine cones.
In case you have never seen a pine cone before, the design is simple but effective. Pine cones are basically a rounded bullet-like shape with lots of holes and crevices on the outside, like a golf ball. On one MythBusters episode they did likewise to a car:
Why I dimpled our container design of course!
After asking my classmates where I might find tennis balls- Mary Grace, Nora and I headed to the tennis courts where we then got on our hands and knees and (very glamorously) crawled under the bushes where we found the tennis balls.
Please allow me to explain something before I continue: we did not know that what we were doing was "wrong," by the looks of the area under the bushes (full of prickly vines and leaf debris) no one had collected the tennis balls for years. But even then we didn't take them all! We took a few, yes, but there are still countless others buried under years of decaying leaves. And as for any of the Tennis coaches who may read this in the future: you can have them back! I only used about four-or-so and most of those I used were gray from use and sun-bleaching. Feel free to take back the others that were not used.
Anyway back to business:
I chose tennis balls for the substance I would use to cover the container with for quite a few reasons. One was that tennis balls are basically invincible. (Like my classmates and I learned latter on when we tried [with no avail] to cut them open.) Another was that their rubbery shell would absorb some of the shock from our container's impact with Earth. The last was that tennis balls are simply amazing. They are the only balls that come to mind when I think of neon-colored sports gear and they are incredibly durable.
So had you been in my 4th period science class Wednesday and Thursday you would have watched this idea of mine come to life before your eyes. You would have also probably laughed as you watched 8th graders try to cut tennis balls in half with safety scissors and duct-tape them onto an barely distinguishable Clorox Wipe container.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Balloon Car!?
OK, so let me be the first to admit that our creation did not work as well as we would have liked it to work. :(
Our car was originally a simple light-weight cardboard body with two CD wheels in the back and a small plastic whirly-gig I found in our basket-of-junk on our kitchen counter for a wheel in the front. It was quite light in weight because at that point we were going to attach a sail to it and have the balloon face backwards thus propelling the balloon car forward with the sail. But our plans changed... "The best laid plans of mice and men may often go arye..." Anyway that's when we decided to sling-shot it down the hall with our creation called "The Chicken." It was going to follow all of the guidelines or "rules" as far as we were concerned. You see we were not going to simply sling-shot it down the hall, beacsue that was illegal. Oh no, that was MUCH too simple. Instead we would have TWO cars, one that would end up breaking the longest distance record by hurtling down the hallway from the sling-shot's force; the other (this one balloon-powered) would pull the wooden dowel out of the way of the first race car. Then zoom- down the hallway it would go.
But as I said, "The best laid plans of mice and men may often go arye..." In other words we abandoned "The Chicken" but only after a test run that proved our theory correct; sling-shooting the car down the hallway would work ten times better than any balloon powered car, mainly because it would have a greater force if it were sling-shot. So after those joyful test runs two of our team members (cough, cough: Madeline and Christian) lost faith in our epic little car sling-shot idea. They claimed that we would "get disqualified" and "the other teams would COMPLAIN," and while they were probably right I would have liked to have heard this concern a little bit earlier. Might I add that this was literally THE AFTERNOON before the final competition, and THE DAY before it was due. (SPOILER: We partially managed in the end!) Switching to panicked- procrastinating-student mode (even though we hadn't procrastinated)we made a few major adjustments to our car that afternoon.
Our car had been light weight. Then when we decided to sling shot it, so we made it heavier. In the end when we needed a super light car, we ended up with a bulky heavy car that barely moved. :( This is what we get for changing just about everything the day before the competition.
But overall we learned from our great failure, we learned not only that a bulky little cardboard car does not do well with a paper/copper wire sail, but we also learned a bit more about the physics behind why that happens, a bit more about applying scientific method (test your hypothesis, then if it doesn't work make adjustments), and we also learned about ourselves. We learned about the ways we deal with pressure in a close deadline, and we also learned about how we react when people turn down our ideas. In the end I'm happy that we failed, because that means we have room for improvement like all of science, and that proves that we are only human.
See here for the mass, acceleration, etc. for the car.
Summarized:
We started out with the brilliant idea of "sling-shotting" out car across the room with our creation that we (Luke, Madeline, Christian, and I) pet named "The Chicken." Anyway we ended up not using the chicken, and instead we created a car with a sail.
Here you can see a me as Hermione, a blurry Mary Grace, an angry Grey and an equally awkward overly-happy Landon along with "Newton's Apple" our final car that moved a pathetic 1 and a half meters.
Our car was originally a simple light-weight cardboard body with two CD wheels in the back and a small plastic whirly-gig I found in our basket-of-junk on our kitchen counter for a wheel in the front. It was quite light in weight because at that point we were going to attach a sail to it and have the balloon face backwards thus propelling the balloon car forward with the sail. But our plans changed... "The best laid plans of mice and men may often go arye..." Anyway that's when we decided to sling-shot it down the hall with our creation called "The Chicken." It was going to follow all of the guidelines or "rules" as far as we were concerned. You see we were not going to simply sling-shot it down the hall, beacsue that was illegal. Oh no, that was MUCH too simple. Instead we would have TWO cars, one that would end up breaking the longest distance record by hurtling down the hallway from the sling-shot's force; the other (this one balloon-powered) would pull the wooden dowel out of the way of the first race car. Then zoom- down the hallway it would go.
But as I said, "The best laid plans of mice and men may often go arye..." In other words we abandoned "The Chicken" but only after a test run that proved our theory correct; sling-shooting the car down the hallway would work ten times better than any balloon powered car, mainly because it would have a greater force if it were sling-shot. So after those joyful test runs two of our team members (cough, cough: Madeline and Christian) lost faith in our epic little car sling-shot idea. They claimed that we would "get disqualified" and "the other teams would COMPLAIN," and while they were probably right I would have liked to have heard this concern a little bit earlier. Might I add that this was literally THE AFTERNOON before the final competition, and THE DAY before it was due. (SPOILER: We partially managed in the end!) Switching to panicked- procrastinating-student mode (even though we hadn't procrastinated)we made a few major adjustments to our car that afternoon.
Our car had been light weight. Then when we decided to sling shot it, so we made it heavier. In the end when we needed a super light car, we ended up with a bulky heavy car that barely moved. :( This is what we get for changing just about everything the day before the competition.
But overall we learned from our great failure, we learned not only that a bulky little cardboard car does not do well with a paper/copper wire sail, but we also learned a bit more about the physics behind why that happens, a bit more about applying scientific method (test your hypothesis, then if it doesn't work make adjustments), and we also learned about ourselves. We learned about the ways we deal with pressure in a close deadline, and we also learned about how we react when people turn down our ideas. In the end I'm happy that we failed, because that means we have room for improvement like all of science, and that proves that we are only human.
See here for the mass, acceleration, etc. for the car.
Summarized:
We started out with the brilliant idea of "sling-shotting" out car across the room with our creation that we (Luke, Madeline, Christian, and I) pet named "The Chicken." Anyway we ended up not using the chicken, and instead we created a car with a sail.
Here you can see a me as Hermione, a blurry Mary Grace, an angry Grey and an equally awkward overly-happy Landon along with "Newton's Apple" our final car that moved a pathetic 1 and a half meters.
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