Mouse Trap race cars
This year me an my group (Carlos and Brooke) participated in the 3rd annual mouse trap race car competition. In our process we started out with a original design but had to take it apart and rethink our design completely. The main problem that we faced was the fact that the string that was attached to the mouse trap was not getting enough grip to the axle to propel the car forward. So the way that we fixed this was by adding a spiral piece to the axles giving the string something to spin on, we also gave our car more length and a lighter frame making it easier to move. We mostly got this idea from the Indie race cars and ow they had that open body with a very long and narrow frame and then we tried to incorporate elements of that into our design. Then on the day of the race we were able to pull through and win the distance challenge but came in second on the acceleration challenge and we were beat by the team mach 3. In this activity are team won a total of 14 achievements.
1. Brainiac: here is the paper which we brainstormed our ideas onto.
2. visualize it: we then created 2 sketches that we decided upon to make our first car and test it.
3. Build It: this is a picture of are very first design
4. The Price of Glory: our final car costed a total of 50$
5. Competitor: Our group competed in the 2nd annual mouse trap race car
6. Long distance winner: after many tweaks here and their are car pulled through and was able to win the competition
7. Going the Mile: since we won the competition w also earned this achievement
8. Heavy Foot: our group was also able to come in second place in the acceleration event
9. Feedback: +:we decided that our first design was very lightweight and extremely simple. change; we decided that the design had to many flaws and it had not enough space for the mouse trap and that it could not spin the axle. ?: we were wondering what our next designe would be and how it would fix our current problems. !:we then came up with the idea of the Indie race car and it work very well.
10.Re-work: we changed our design from the old one to one that was longer and was able to spin the axle. Here is a picture.
11. Game Changer- A new rule that i was thinking of was not being able to tape anything to the mouse trap. For example we taped a metal rod to ours so that it would give it a easier pull and make it go farther I feel that if this element was taken our it would make it a lot more difficult and make the person think harder about how they could create a car.
12. Name it: the name that i was thinking of changing was "Re-Work" and then changing it to "Mulligan"
13. Leave it cleaner than you found it: our group was always very clean about our materials every day when we were finished working we would all gather up all of the loose materials and put them back in the rack and then place a car in the locker and make sure that everything where we were working was cleaned up before we left.
14. Design/Build: the design build process if showed below, and we experienced it in many ways especially step 10 because we were constantly running into more and more problems and it seemed every time we fixed one a new one would appear to that was the one step that we spent that most time on until we were able to finalize the project.
