This is a picture of what our completed building looks like.

I think that from this project, I learned that working with a team, especially when you have a limited “budget” can be quite difficult. It was challenging to agree on things as a group, like what to spend our money on, or how to design the building. Eventually, we had to compromise a little, so that everyone’s design idea’s were combined as one. It was also tough to work with limited resources. We had to be extremely careful to ensure we weren’t accidentally snapping the spaghetti sticks, tearing the minature marshmallows, or cutting the tape too small. Because our budget was so limited, we couldn’t afford to damage any of our materials, especially since we decided against purchasing the insurance options. I think if I were to do this project over again, I would’ve been more careful on the last day of the project, and to not have messed with our building. This is because when we walked into class the day we’d test our buildings, one of the posts went missing from the bottom of our building. Instead of removing the other three posts from the bottom, we tried to take off an extra piece of tape from the top, but all we accomplished was breaking one of the spaghetti noodles, which was extremely difficult to fix in the 5 minutes left before presentations started. In the end, this was an extremely interesting, and also quite difficult project.

In this test, my group and I decided to test how the weight of a washer on a parachute would affect how quickly it would fall to the ground. We used 4 different washers, 2 large, and 2 small. We ran 3 trials for each washer. Our goal was to find out which washer would accelerate to the ground faster. Big washer 1 was 0.013kg, which is also 0.127lbs. It accelerated at an average speed of 136.1 cm/s towards the ground. Big washer 2 was 0.014kg, which is also 0.137lbs. The washer accelerated at an average speed of 213.44 cm/s towards the ground. It was a pretty big difference, even though the mass of the objects only have a difference of a thousandth of a kilogram. Small washer 1 was 0.005kg, which would also be 0.049lbs. It accelerated at an average speed of 137.97 cm/s as it fell to the bottom of the stairs. Smaller washer 2 was 0.006kg, which is the same as 0.059lbs. The washer accelerated at an average speed of 147.7 cm/s towards the ground at the bottom of the stairs. There was a much smaller difference between the two numbers for the speed of the smaller washers than in the bigger washers. The washer’s masses also only had a thousandth of difference between them. The reason why the larger washers fell faster than the smaller washers, was because they had larger masses. If you add in air resistance and gravity, the objects with larger masses fall faster, than ones with smaller masses. Friction would also have a larger role in how fast an object fell if it were a smaller object with a smaller mass. So, in conclusion, in our experiment the washers with the greater mass fell faster (on average) than the washers with the smaller masses.

Here is the Pixton comic that I created about doing this Pendulum Weight Lab (note: you need to click the fullscreen button in order to view the entire comic, then you can click and drag to see the entire thing)