Introduction

This blog has been created to show our teams work in our DNT assignment. The assignment is to create a car out of basic materials such as jinx wood and chloroplast that will have to somehow be propelled by a mousetrap to travel as many floor tiles as possible. Here is a list of all the different parts of this assignment:  create a design sketch, raise ten questions that are relevant to the mousetrap car, answer ten questions about how to operate special machinery, document everything that is being done for this assignment on a blog, creating the mousetrap car, and testing it. This blog will be updated every time we have progressed with our assignment.

Marathon Mice Crew Logo

This is our logo for our mousetrap car assignment.

Images of our mousetrap car

Side View (Left Side)

Side View (Right side)

Front View

Top View 1

Top View 2

Final Assembly

Today was our last class to finish building our mousetrap car as well as marked the beginning to start testing our mousetrap cars. Today, we managed to finish assembling our car, yet when we tested it out, we realized that it would not pick up speed due to its weight. We figured that if we were to drill holes in the frame, it would reduce the weight of the mousetrap car and would enable our car to pick up more speed and to be able to travel farther.
Lesson we learned today:
Heavier = more friction
Lighter = less friction

Almost completed our mousetrap car

Yesterday, we got another chance to continue building our mousetrap car. We didn't get too much done, considering that we were trying to figure out how to attach the back wheels and made a mistake mid-way through which led to us taking it apart again and restarting it. We are 8 weeks into the project now, and we should be able to test out and complete our mousetrap car the following week.

More Progress with wheels

Today we have received a bit more time to work on our mousetrap car. This class we were working on making wheels out of chloroplast as well as we extended our car so that it is about 2 times longer. The reason for this is the longer the car, the longer the arm can be and the longer the arm results in the more string that is pulled which gives it more acceleration.

Lesson learnt today:

Longer the arm = more acceleration

More Progress

Today we have received the opportunity to continue our work on our mousetrap car. We learnt how to cut out a wheel out of chloroplast. We have also learnt that it is essential to use bigger wheels because the bigger the wheel is, the longer distances it can travel in one rotation.

Lesson learnt today:
Bigger wheel = Longer distance travelled in one rotation