Fire Away- Our Trebuchet
By Gabriella Vasquez, Nico Lofrano, and Kyle Ramser
We were given the assignment to build a trebuchet that was the most effective, fired the farthest, and was smaller than one meter by one meter. It had to throw a small clay ball as many meters as possible and work efficiently. We were given the limits of a base that could hold itself up, two legs, one movable arm, and one axle. The trebuchet also had to to work on it's own without aid and be reusable in the sense of multiple trials.
My new group set to work and in two days quickly created the trebuchet you see at right. We nailed two thick pieces of wood together as our base, two longs legs, and a really long arm. On one end of the arm there is a nail which the rubber bands attach to and on the other side there is a hook where our projectile attaches to. The dimensions of everything can be found in my "Proof of Efficacy" document located above the picture at right. After building and running our trebuchet a few times, each group was given a single variable to research, gather data, create a conclusion, and share our findings with the class. Our single variable was "does the fixed location of the rubber bands matter when firing a trebuchet?". My data and CLEAR paragraph can be found in my "Proof of Efficacy" document. The next step of the project was sharing with the class our findings, and then taking those conclusions to better our own machines. We were required to make 8 modifications to try to make our trebuchet the best it could be. My 8 modifications and their explanations can be found in my "Proof of Efficacy" document. In this document, you can also find all the concepts that go along with this project and the physics behind our trebuchet. |
Reflection
This project was the first one we got to build using The Maker's Space. One thing that I learned during this project was Spring Potential Energy. I learned all about it and working hands on, I learned how to calculate for it. It was fun to see how that number affected our final project. Another valuable trait I learned was how to correctly set up experiments and collect data to create a CER chart and CLEAR paragraph. That will be something that I can use throughout my next couple years in STEM. One thing I believe we could of worked on was the brainstorming portion of it. We just set out to work and began building our model without really taking the time to gather our ideas and plan out the sizes of each thing. Another thing that I can work on in future projects would be to really take the time to consider options when modifying our project. We just picked eight ideas from the list without really considering which ones would work the best for us. But even though the thought process of building our trebuchet wasn't the best, our final product still fired up to 25 meters.
This project was the first one we got to build using The Maker's Space. One thing that I learned during this project was Spring Potential Energy. I learned all about it and working hands on, I learned how to calculate for it. It was fun to see how that number affected our final project. Another valuable trait I learned was how to correctly set up experiments and collect data to create a CER chart and CLEAR paragraph. That will be something that I can use throughout my next couple years in STEM. One thing I believe we could of worked on was the brainstorming portion of it. We just set out to work and began building our model without really taking the time to gather our ideas and plan out the sizes of each thing. Another thing that I can work on in future projects would be to really take the time to consider options when modifying our project. We just picked eight ideas from the list without really considering which ones would work the best for us. But even though the thought process of building our trebuchet wasn't the best, our final product still fired up to 25 meters.