Roller Coaster Project Blog - Motion VI - 2/18/18

Roller Coaster Project Blog : Victor N. 8B

Summary

A roller coaster is a track with an operation, that could be a car or cart. There are different elements into a roller coaster, that includes a hill, turn, and a loop. Roller coaster have certain factors that add thrill to the ride, aka "thrill factors." In this Roller Coaster project, we are to create a roller coaster using tubes, dowels, and tape. The roller coaster can only be inside the 4ftx2ft base, and must have a safe stop. I learned that we need to be precise of where we place the tube. If we don't, the tube might be placed wrong, and that will affect our ride. We learned to fix our mistakes, by modifying and making any changes as needed. The ride ended up working as planned.

Backward-Looking: What problems did you encounter while you were working on this piece? How did you solve them?

We had encountered some problems while working on this project. For example, when creating our hills and turns, we didn't have the right position which caused the marble to fall off the track and not go through the entire runway. Another problem we had was keeping the dowels upright. A dowel itself will not fit into the holes of the base. We fixed that by adding tape around it to fill up space. We also added some support to it. As you can see, we encountered some problems but found a way to solve them.

Inward-Looking: Have you changed any ideas you used to have on this subject? 

When starting this project, we had some ideas for our roller coaster. One idea was kind of like a water slide, and the other idea was a "pretzel." We did one of them, and made the water slide. After looking at the requirements, we didn't have a hill. By adding both a pretzel and a hill, it would not fit so we only added a hill to fit the requirements. As you can see, we changed our ideas that we originally had on this project.

Outward-Looking: What grade would you give it? Why?

I would give this project a grade of B+. I'm not being harsh on myself, nor my teammates. My teammates might give this project, an A. I would give this project a B+, because as of right now, it's kinda plain. Even though the requirements do not include decorations or prettiness. We are graded on the looks, but I feel like we can decorate this and clean the tape up a bit. As you can see, I would give this project a grade of a B+.

Forward-Looking: What would you like to spend more time on in school?

If I had more time in school, I would spend it with my group to continue to construct our roller coaster. Yes, we can build a roller coaster in 1 week. But, if you want to make it look perfect and nice, and finish the analysis and design, we would need at least 1 week. It has not been a week, and we already got the roller coaster, without decorations, and most of design brief done. If we had 2 more days, we would have the entire project. As you can see, we would spend more time in school on building the roller coaster.

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