-This project went way to fast! I thought we would have way longer so my group took our time, but in the end we didn’t fail horribly. We had from January 16th to January 20th to learn about collar coasters, plan, then build. And heres how it went!

 

Learning!!

The first thing you have to do to start a project is to get to know the topic. In this case our amazing topic was collar coasters (very random I know). We started to watch a few videos teaching us about Kinetic energy, Potential energy, and The law of conservation of energy. I remember learning these things a long time ago and it was a good recap.

Kinetic energy – is energy that is collected by movement, it is the most known and popular source of energy. Anything moving like a windmill, water mill, or even your socks running along a carpet can gather kinetic energy fast. There is the most kinetic energy at the bottom of a roller coaster after the kart and gone down the hill and collected all the energy, then as it goes back up it loses the kinetic energy and it turns into potential energy.

Potential energy – is a type of energy that is stored up before it turns into kinetic energy. As the name suggests potential energy is when energy has the potential to turn into a greater energy like kinetic energy. Picture a cooler coaster at the top of the hill before the big drop, everyones waiting for the drop but nothing has happened yet. That waiting and anticipation is the potential energy, which is then turned into kinetic energy after it goes down the hill.

The law of conservation energy – this is a law that states ‘energy cannot be created or destroyed’. The only way energy is called different things is because it changes and transforms itself, energy is everywhere all the time but it can be gathered more in a certain way when certain things happen.

 

Planning!!

This project required a lot of planning to do properly, but wait I forgot to even explain what we needed to do for this project.

Our mission was to order supplies that cost a certain amount of money (fake money obviously) when we only had a certain amount of money ourselves. With these supplies (toilet paper roll, tooth picks, tape, marble, scissors) we had to make a mini roller coaster model to show off to the judges (our teachers). At the start we were given 1 million dollars and a list of supplies we could order from, but we had to stay under budget.

 

My group ( Logan and Keaton) and I decided to not get any toothpicks because we wanted to save our money and didn’t think it was necessary. We wanted to spend all our money on tubes and tape.

Then after we ordered our supplies we drew out our plan on how to build our roller coaster. Each element of the coaster had a certain amount of points, and we tried to get the most points possible without running out of supplies.

After planning for a little bit we finally came up with this:

Our final product came out a littleeeeeee bit different

 

Building!!

Here is where the trouble started to come into play. We thought that we had a long time to build so we didn’t rush into it. On the first day we mainly planned out how we were going to build this structure onto a chair and how we are going to do it with 6 tubes. The next few days we started building slowly but suddenly I heard the teacher say “20 more minutes!” 20 more minutes?? 20 more minutes till what? Then I found out that we only had 20 minutes to finish our entire coaster and test it to make sure it works. We then just started throwing tape and tubes together and try our best to get some kind of roller coaster out together. For the time we had I think it didn’t end up to horribly but if we had longer (or actually knew our time constraints) we could have done a lot better. I don’t know how many points the judges ended up giving us but hopefully it wasn’t that bad.

Here is some pictures of our amazing roller coaster:

Our plan to make a cork screw was to simply have the marble fall into a tube on a slant so it would spin in the tube but I don’t think the judges counted it, here is a slow motion video of our cork screw: Slow mo video

 

So that was our roller coaster project that went way too fast for me to keep up (I do not like fast roller coasters (or ones with drops) (or really any roller coasters).

Thank you for reading 🎢