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PROJECT TWO:

THE INVERMINATOR

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

This project revolved around creating a vehicle for four passengers. Our goal was to drop the car down a ramp at four different heights (0, 30, 60, and 100 centimeters), and measure the distance the car travelled.

MATERIALS

  • Cardboard box (body of the car or "chassy")

  • 4 CD's (wheels)

  • 2 dowels (axels)

  • 4 pieces of wood with a hole in the center (wheel adapter)

  • 4 pieces of cardboard with a hole in the center (bearings)

  • 4 gummy worms (passengers)

  • Hot glue gun

  • Box cutter (to cut away for passengers, if need be)

These are images of our car before we began to decorate it and design how to best protect our vermin passengers. We began to construct our car using a Cheez-It box as the body of the car, wooden dowels as our two axels, cardboard squares as bearings, wooden squares as wheel adapters, and 4 CD's as the wheels. After hot-gluing all of our materials together, we were left with this rough construction of our "Inverminator".

K-6 Curriculum

  • K.P.1.2: Give examples of different ways objects and organisms move (to include falling to the ground when dropped): 

        Straight, Zigzag, Round and round

  • 3.P .1.1: Infer changes in speed or direction resulting from forces acting on an object.

  • 3.P .1.2: Compare the relative speeds (faster or slower) of objects that travel the same distance in different amounts of time.

  • 5.P .1.1: Explain how factors such as gravity, friction, and change in mass affect the motion of objects.

  • 5.P .1.2: Infer the motion of objects in terms of how far they travel in a certain amount of time and the direction in which they travel.

  • 5.P .1.3: Illustrate the motion of an object using a graph to show a change in position over a period of time.

  • 5.P .1.4: Predict the effect of a given force or a change in mass on the motion of an object.

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NEWTON'S LAW

Seat belts work just as the forces in our previous project, "The Slow-er-Coaster" worked. Seat belts are able to stop objects (the driver and other passengers) from continuously moving in motion. For example, if a car is moving at a steady pace of 45 miles per hour, and suddenly stops, a seat belt is able to stop the passenger and the driver from moving in motion, even though the car has stopped. We have learned that inertia is the tendency for objects to move, or stay still, depending on what they were doing before a force acted upon them. Because a force acts upon the car to make it stop (friction causes something to stop, and the brakes in this case would be friction), a human's inertia is its tendency to keep moving. A seat belt stops that person from moving or going through the windshield of the car and is thus an unbalanced force acting upon a person to make them stop. 

AS APPLIED TO SEAT BELTS

Measure and Estimate Lengths in Standard Units

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.2.MD.A.1

Measure the length of an object by selecting and using appropriate tools such as rulers, yardsticks, meter sticks, and measuring tapes.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.2.MD.A.3
Estimate lengths using units of inches, feet, centimeters, and meters.

Represent and Interpret Data

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.2.MD.D.9
Generate measurement data by measuring lengths of several objects to the nearest whole unit, or by making repeated measurements of the same object. Show the measurements by making a line plot, where the horizontal scale is marked off in whole-number units.

MATH TOOLS

This table represents the height of the ramps, three distances the car traveled on each ramp, and the average distance of each ramp. 

This graph represents the average distance for each ramp.

Energy Transfer

In class, we discussed that this project could be a solar energy. "How can it be solar energy if I can't see the Sun?", you may ask, but let me tell you! The Sun had to help grow plants, such as wheat, and that wheat became cereal. I ate that cereal the morning of my Build It class, giving me the kinetic energy to drop the Inverminator down its ramp. The Inverminator then contained gravitational potential energy as I held it up on the ramp, and then transferred into sound and heat energy as it went down the ramp, warmed the floor, and created a sound when it crashed. Isn't that so cool? Energy is all around us, and can all be summed back to the Sun!

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