Final Blog Post Wrap up and Reflection

Our projects have come to a close :( I have learned a lot of things during this process about teamwork, physics, and more. I learned that when everyone does their part and stays on track, we get the work done alot faster and have time for the little things that make our roller coasters better.

We learned about the laws of physics and how to create a roller coaster around them.

The only thing I might have done differently is use the same marble the whole time because we only realized later that the marbles weighed different amounts, and that effected the way they ran along the track so we were constantly adjusting.

I think in the end our roller coaster turned out really well and I am very proud of the work my team and I accomplished. I am sad that the roller coaster project and come to a close, but I am happy of the way my team and I worked together, and I have no regrets about the way we did things.

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Physics Project 2014 - Blog Post #3

So far our project has gone relatively well, we are nearly finished with the general building of our roller coaster, and so far everything works. Last class we were able to secure everything with string so it will not fall over. Inertia has effected our building progress a lot, because a lot of the turns we had planned out on our initial draft were to sharp, and with inertia, the marble would just fly of the edge. We were able to change the turns, so the marble was not effected by inertia. Something that has been really frustrating as we built was the tape keeps coming unstuck, so the tubing will just fall off when we come to work on it the next day, so we have to figure out where it was before, and sometimes it doesn't work right away, so we have to do all the placement experimenting all over again. Something that has been going really well is our loop, because it works every time, and it is able to slow down the marble enough so it doesn't go flying off the track.

 

Here is a picture of our roller coaster after class was over...

This is our roller coaster after today's building

 

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Physics Projects 2014 - Blog Post #2

One of the struggles we have been having so far with our project, and we encountered it a lot today, was when we used double sided tape to stick the tube that the marble goes in, onto a pipe, it would create little bumps in the bottom of the tube. And then, when the marble hit those bumps, it was traveling at such a hig velocity from the incline, it would just shoot off the tube instead of turning, subject to Newtons First Law, "An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force." We fixed our problem by placing strips of cardboard underneath the tube in between the tube and the pipe, that allowed for a smooth ride down.

Here is a picture of our roller coaster after working on it today.

 

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Physics Project Reflection #1

 

 

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