William's Portfolio

What did I learn? We learned how crumple zones and seatbelts work together to save a passenger that’s in a car crash. On our egg car, we used a seatbelt because it could act as the unbalanced force in Newton’s First Law, the law of inertia. The first law stated that an object in motion will stay in motion and a object at rest will stay at rest unless an unbalanced force acts on it. After the car hit the block, the egg wanted to keep going, so we added a seatbelt. We used a crumple zone to dampen the force applied back by the concrete block.

What Worked? Our crumple zone worked, and our seatbelt also worked because they managed to protect the egg from cracking. Our wheels and our car body were very sturdy and didn’t break or rip. The egg didn’t crack, even though our car flipped and the egg hit the block.

What did not work? Our back wheel flew of as a result of the force applied by the concrete block, even though our crumple zone worked and dampened the force. Our back wheels didn’t have enough tape on them.

Personal Relevance: I think that me and Elaine did a pretty good job because our egg car did not break fully, it was a small break, and our egg survived the crash. Our partnership went pretty well, and our car qualified all the criteria on building it.

What Did I Do? I experimented with Indi robotic car and Gravitrax toys, and I used them to strengthen my critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is using what you already know, testing things using logic, and using creativity to solve problems.

What Did I Learn? I learned how to apply my critical thinking skills to problems and what is critical thinking. Critical thinking was the act of using what you know, using logic, and using your imagination to solve a challenging or hard problem.

What Worked? I thought critically and our track design worked out really well because we could put a lot on the different levels and because you could track the marble’s progress as it went down. Also, if the marble got stuck, then we could get it out really easily because we could remove the different layers. At first, we decided to use our ramps and a spiral for going down from the top layer, but it was too fast and kept flying off. So, we swiched to a trampolie, but then we found out that our drop onto the trampolie was too low, so we changed it with a simple fix. We made the drop be higher by adding some blocks onto the towers, and it did work very well. For Indi, we identified the “program” really fast and we were able to do all the challenges successfully because our key was accurate and we observed the challenge card well. We were so good we added a few tweaks here and there, such as changing the code with slowing down Indi, speeding up, and a finish.

What Did Not Work? Me and Hayoon struggled to think of a good “elevator” for making the marble go down between the levels, but we found out that the track and the track piece could never meet, so we scrapped that idea to switch it with a different type of going down. The classic drop method. We also wanted to make the track super fast with a magnet launcher, but we didn’t have enough marbles. For Indi, our robot would sometimes go too fast or sometimes miss the next piece of “program” entirely. It was either because it was off centered or the cards weren’t placed correctly.

Personal relevance: Me and Hayoon made up a pretty good team as we were both really good at gravitrax and we were friends. But I think that we spent a bit too much time on experimenting on Indi, because we ran out of time and we only did 7 challenge cards. But other than that, I think it went pretty well. Not only that, we also made a really good gravitrax track with very limited materials.