Charlotte Fishman - Project Overview

Our goal was to create a car out of Kinex pieces that will go faster and father than every other car. I used Pinterest as my inspiration for a design because this website holds a lot of information, and I have been inspired by posts on Pinterest in the past. We did not have many Our car has a small wheel in front, support beams in the back that create a triangle-like shape, and two large wheels in back. We thought doing this would add more weight to the back, so it would be able to go faster. Our car was very durable and stable (we tried throwing it in the air - not the best idea, but the car never broke, and was very supportive). Our car was also held together by many connector pieces, which gave it a structure and support system.
This was not our original idea. At first, we had the idea to have four large wheels, just like a normal car. We also had a different idea of the shape. Another idea we had was a completely random "bunny head" over the car. We decided to take this off, as it was getting in the way and not affecting the speed whatsoever.
We recently put our car to the final test - putting it down the ramp. We measured the distance as the length of the ramp, which was 2.46 meters. After three trials, our average speed was 1.57 meters per second. Though that is pretty fast, it did not compare well to the other groups. We did not win the competition, but this was a fun experience. We learned the rules of motion and different ways to calculate speed, while using the engineering design process in a fun hands-on activity. If I were to do this again, I would have done a completely different design of the car. The ramp did have a hole right in the middle (where the center wheel was), so maybe I wouldn't have put a wheel right in the center. I would have made a smaller car, and made larger changes after testing the car multiple times. In conclusion, I did enjoy this project.