- I believe that, based on what I learned from my Individual Research Project, it is important to try to keep our project as simple as possible. Not only will that increase the efficiency of our tests, but it will also help us troubleshoot any problems we might encounter. If we are able to keep our project simple, we shouldn't have any issues getting the main function to work correctly. Any additional changes can be made after.
- Nothing has really gone too great up until today. The idea my group originally had wouldn't work as our air tank wasn't certified. Because of this, we had to come up with a completely new design. We began construction on a trebuchet last week, trying to make it both consistent and accurate. Today, we modified it slightly by adding a sling and were successfully able to launch ping pong balls a considerable distance.
- I think that it will be pretty difficult to create an accurate trebuchet. We will have to perform lots of tests to figure out the spacing between our machine and the mason jar. Furthermore, we must make it consistent enough to toss at least 10 ping pong balls into the jar in under a minute. Another problem we face is reloading the trebuchet, which must be pulled back quite fast in order to get the 10 balls off in time. We haven't really put too much thought into this part yet tho as we want to get the actual machine to function first.
- I've been very busy these past couple weeks. School hasn't been particularly difficult, but the workload just seems to grow exponentially. I'm slowly getting through the stuff I need to for college apps but should probably speed it up a bit. Volleyball takes up a lot of time because I'm doing both beach and club simultaneously, which is very draining. Other than all that, it's going great.