Glider Design Project

Day one: Looked up different glider design options on the internet, looked at flying squirell videos

Day two: Found a very successful glider design in a video on youtube, we decided to test this design so we build a few prototypes out of regular printer paper to see if we could get this design to work for ourselves. Glider prototype results: Glider design too heavy with regular printer paper, attmepting same design but with tissue paper.

Day 3: Attempted to build a full size version of our prototype, we made a design change involving the wing design. We chose not to cut off the backside of the wing in order to increase surface area, in exchange for aerodynamtics. When tested the glider was too unstable and adding wooden supports was required. This made the glider too heavy so we are discussing whether to change our glider design completely. Now we have to main designs that we are considering.

Day 4: We built a prototype for a new design for our glider, the printer paper version performed much better than our original design so we decided to build a tissue paper version in order to see how it would perform on a full size version. We now have two designs with different people supporting each one.

Day 5: After testing we have determined that rafe's design is the better design to use, unfortunatly someone else must have realized that because our finished plane was stolen, forcing us to rebuild our glider from scratch, luckily we had enough of our materials left to completely rebuild our glider.

Day 6: the day of our actual competition, our first design won the first challenge for distance travelled and our second design got 2nd for the hang time challenge. the reason i think our gliders didnt perform as well as we wanted them to is because we made them to light so they were more greatly affected by wind, i also think that tissue paper is too light of a material to make gliders from. It also didn't help that there was an abnormal amount of wind on the day we did the competition, which greatly affected the performance of all the gliders.

Robot Design Project

First I'm going to post some potential robot designes we made on graph paper:

Final design:

Design Pros: The complexity of our design ensures that little mistakes will be made while the machine is sorting marbles

Did not take up that much space compared to other robot designs in the class

Besides pistons, the lack of moving parts lowered the chance for something to go wrong.

Design cons: the heavy reliance on pneumatics made the tubing requirements very high for our project, and we probably could hae done it more efficiently.

Having so many pistons also made our machine somewhat slow, while it did make the 2 minute mark, it just barely did so

I think this activity was interesting because it showed me how important long-term planning and forward thinking are to a design process. I noticed this because we just kind of started building our machine without even knowing what the whole thing was going to look like in the end, which forced us the have to do some re-designes late in the process. This lack of planning is also what led to the messy look and ramshackle design of our robot, i think that if we had planned more in the beginnning then we could have mad our robot much more efficient and neater in it's design.

I do think our group was successful in the teamwork aspect of this project. This is because everyone got a chance to voice their ideas and everyone got some of their idea's implemented in the final robot design. I also think building something like this is much easier to do in a team because you get so many different ideas then if you were just working on it by yourself.

I think we were successful in this project because it completed all the specified goals of the project including, sorting fifteen marbles in under two minutes, being able to differentiate between marbles of different colors and materials, and being completely autonomous.