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

Ten Research Questions

Here is a picture of our ten research questions. As you can see at the bottom of the page is our sign of approval plus an extra 3 bonus points for being the first group to complete this part of the assignment.


Ten Questions:
1. How can we ensure that our mousetrap car will travel straight?
2. What is friction, where does it exist? How can we reduce the friction in the wheels and why?
3. What materials should we use to make our mousetrap car and why?
4.What does our mousetrap car have to do?
5. What should the dimensions of our mousetrap car be? (length x height x width)
6. Where are we getting the energy to power our mousetrap car? (power output)
7. What should the mass of our mousetrap car be to travel fast?
8. What is the purpose of extending the arm on the mousetrap car?
9. How do we calculate the speed of our mousetrap car?
10. How will we build the frame of our mousetrap car to keep it stable, but light?

Design Sketches for our Mousetrap Car

This is our design sketch for our mousetrap car. As you can see in the bottom left corner is our approval to start building it. The top drawing is the "side view" and the bottom drawing is the "top view"and on both drawings it lists the dimensions.

February 29th, 2012

Until today we have already gotten our design sketch approved as well as our ten design questions. Today Jennifer started answering the ten questions on how to operate special machinery in the DNT lab, Yueyang started working on the crossword puzzle, and Joshua started cutting the jinx wood to create the mousetrap car. Next DNT class isn't until next Wednesday, February 7th, 2012. Design sketches for our project as well as the ten questions about our mousetrap car will be posted shortly.