Physics
Documentary Project
In this project, I grew a lot with communication and my editing skills. When I used to work in groups, I still do it now, but I used to take over and completely block out my classmates, but I've learned that I cannot do everything, and that overwhelms me. I never really thought about my teammates until this project, because this project really made me rethink how I should work in a world. In terms of editing, I used to hate using a premier pro, but when I got used to the program, I began creating our movie nonstop, I worked on our video for a whole weekend plus 3 more days, and I feel like I've gotten the motivation to edit and create more videos.
During this project, I had to work on most of my 21st-century skills to make sure I can successfully work in a group. Because I love working at my own speed and by myself, but at the same time, my group members suffered dramatically because I didn't communicate until a third of the way into the project, but, I feel like I've learned to help my teammates by communicating with them instead of leaving them in the dust. For Refinement, I've grown even more, because we had many versions of our video, but one never really stuck until we found a layout to create a very artistic feeling for the intro. I would have to say that we went through 4-5 versions of our video. I had a lot of room to be creative in our video, but I wanted it to have a dramatic feeling about our film, but at the same time, wanted to have some of our own touches to our film, like the typewriter effect, No one else had that in their film and i feel like our films introduction was kind of unique because of that.
Circular Motion can be applied to a space settlement because it can help with artificial gravity. For our space settlement, we want to be in a space ship, and on a planet. We wanted to create artificial gravity because without gravity your muscles can atrophy quickly because, in zero g's, you wouldn't need your muscles. This circular motion is a centrifugal force because when spinning, you are being pulled outwards, thus making artificial gravity.
Another Physics concept that can apply to this is torque, torque is a twisting force that causes rotation, because all rotation needs a little twist into it, before it can start moving, and torque helps with rotation because Torque is a twisting or turning force that tends to cause rotation around an axis, which might be a center of mass or a fixed point.
And torque and center of gravity relate to each other because when you have a spinning object and you want the perfect turn, without any discrepancies, you would need to make sure that whatever you're spinning has to be on a fixed point with the perfect center of gravity.
First law: In an inertial frame of reference, an object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force.
Second law: In an inertial frame of reference, the vector sum of the forces F on an object is equal to the mass m of that object multiplied by the acceleration an of the object: F = ma. (It is assumed here that the mass m is constant – see below.)
Third law: When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.
Projectile
Trebuchets
So in ninth grade. This was our first project, which is called the Trebuchet Project. In this project, there were a lot of levels to make a functioning trebuchet. The first level was to find different ideas for a prototype. We were going to first choose the Whipper Trebuchet, but there were difficulties on how this would work. So my group "The Moths" chose a trebuchet that is easy to construct and easy to launch projectiles. Then we went into the prototyping phase. We worked for about a week to construct our prototypes and we had to go through a test. And that test is that we had to have at least 3/5 or 4/5 Launches. "The Moths" had passed the test with 4/5 launches and we were able to go onto the building the large trebuchet.
So with a trebuchet. You have 5 number of important components to make this work. You have the Swing Arm, The Counterweight, the Stand, the fulcrum, and the sling. With the counterweight trebuchet, to make projectile motion you have to first do the research on how to store potential energy and convert that to kinetic energy. After you've done the research, you can begin making your trebuchet. For the best launch, your trebuchet arm has to have a ratio of 1:3.75. For the best projectile motion, your sling has to be the same length as the swing arm. So that the tension in the sling is great enough for the best launch for your projectile. For your velocity, making sure that you have the best projectile motion. You need to make sure that your counterweight meets the requirement also. We found when launching potatoes. That 60 lb is the best weight for the counterweight. Because it's not too heavy but at the same time not too light. We had many discrepancies with finding the ideal weight for our counterweight. It took us about 14 tries to get perfect weight. But at the same time, our weight was falling out, so we had to refill the counterweight many times.
What it means to be a community of leaders. Well, We had gone through many discrepancies throughout the project. We were annoyed at each other, we didn't really have the same ideas until one of them actually worked. We had many things going on. But my group had the same ideal mindset for this project. We wanted to make this perfect. We wanted to create a whipper trebuchet, but after argument after argument, we decided on making a simple design for a trebuchet. Once we all got our acts together about the trebuchet design, we started to get to work. My group wanted to make the best/most powerful trebuchet. We had many creative ideas.
One of the most creative ideas was to make the trebuchet look like a millennial spray painted it. So Elliot bought a good amount of spray paint cans, and we went on painting. We make little drips of paint going down, we make the paint look like there was "yellow blood" Dripping down. Making it look like we took a castle with it. We had to replace our sling after our first prototype of the sling started to rip, which was made out of a burlap sack. So over the weekend, I went to the store and bought a poly tarp, some grommets, and a grommet tool. Then I made our sling which was working perfectly at the exhibition but failed us when the final round was upon us. Our sling was a creative idea, but it made us 2nd place in the project.
The most challenging part of the trebuchet project was to find the right design for our sling. Because we had many attempts with an old sling on our final product. Then I came up with a sling that worked well. Even another group wanted to pay me to make them a sling. The new sling was in the shape of a diamond and had two isosceles triangles at the end. Once we had the design I started to act upon it and make a sling that would launch projectiles 130 ft+.
I feel like I brought my creativity to the group. I'm not much of a building myself. But during this project, I thought of some crazy ideas for the looks of our trebuchet. One of the ideas that we all came up with was to make the trebuchet look crazy. Make it look like someone spraypainted/graffitied all over our trebuchet.