I worked with Wes, Israel, and Chase for this two week challenge. We worked diligently, smart, and safe. In the end, we had the best canoe in our class, winning almost every challenge.
Achievements:
Design Achievements
1. Design the problem and Brainstorm solutions
The problem was that we had to build a boat using only cardboard and duct tape
We needed our boat to be:
- strong
- sleek
- well floating
- water resistant
- high walls
- reinforced structure
- good wall joints
- double walled and floored
- maneuverable
- covered completely in duct tape\
- small enough that we don't need to do anything outside of class
- corners damage resistant and covered well
- ability to have a person in, completely dry
- ability to have two people in, completely dry
- balance
- large
- conserve duct tape
- fast
- easy to move, not too heavy
- colorful and artistic
Our main criteria that we followed in this challenge was the boats ability to cross the pool
Our main constraint in this challenge was to completely cover the boat in duct tape, well
3. Sketch Ideas
4. Prototype Ideas
5. Select an approach
6. Build It!
7. The Fastest
24.57 seconds is how long it took us to reach the other side, we smoked the other teams by at least 5 seconds, maybe more!
8. The Farthest
We traveled about 250 yards, which is 10 laps, and we could have gone farther, but we had to start the other challenges.
9. The Longest
We were the last team standing, we could have stayed up for at least a half of an hour, but we tested the boats limits and fit 460 pounds in it.
10. Balance Master
We had both Chase and Israel stand up in our boat
11. Videographer
If you want to see the video of our boat, go to Wes's blog at www.ipodman2001.blogspot.com for it. I would upload it here, but he has the iphone 5 and it will not allow me to post it on here from a PC.
12. Feedback
- Strong floor really supported our weight well
- The front and back walls were well duct taped and remained powerful, even after we had sunk
- Our swimmer/pullers really moved quickly and dominated the other teams
- The side walls were weak----We should have put on more layers of cardboard, and it would have held for a lot longer
- Our vibrant colors really added to our design
- We could have duct taped the boat better---ultimately was our slow demise, should have taken more times, maybe at a lunch, to duct tape it better
- Our boat design was copied by other teams, but ours worked the best
- We had a very hydrodynamic design for gliding through the water
- We had a lighter person, Chase, to go in the boat at first, but it could even hold me
- We mangled the original box design to create our own formation---We could have made a V-bottom
If we were to create another boat, we would most likely use the same design, except with making the walls more stable.
Our achievement was to have our boat hold over 450 pounds! I think we can call this achievement the "Heavy Loader". We had Wes, Israel and Chase in our boat at the same, and we could have fit more weight if we had enough room! I would approximate our total capacity around 500 pounds.
15. How low did you go?
We went down only about a suprising 2-3 inches! The unit weight of water in pounds is 1.936 pounds/cubic foot. Chase weighed about 150 pounds. With the math that I did, I divided Chase's weight divided by the unit weight of water, and then divided that by 12, which would give us inches. The final answer is about 6.5 inches, which is pretty close to 3 inches, and it makes sense.
