Jet Car Report

Balloon Jet Car Report

Baylis Mitchell

    The balloon jet car project overall was a success throughout the class and helped everyone figure out how motion works by seeing what is needed to make something go. It was nice to be able to use other peers work as a reference point to maybe help the design progress. The ability retry and redesign gave the ability to prototype multiple to rethink failure which would eventually lead to success.

Farthest Distance

5.03

    I got a B on this project because my car would only go so far and this was the grade I got for the distance since it is what Mr. Lammers set. I got about an average distance in the grading line but I feel that I could have had mastery in the distance if I had taken a little more time working on each individual car. Actually, although I should have spent more time working on them the final design did work the best but the car would have gone farther if it had been improved. I think I got a B because there were times when I was goofing off and could have been working and everything would have been better if I had thought harder.

  A perfect Jet Car in a certain opinion is one with perfect axles which would send the car  speeding straight across the room. The car would have incredible acceleration for a speed challenge and would make it launch into the air over a jump. But, it would need to be able to carry a lot and still go far to complete the weight challenge. This way it would be able to create an unbeatable record in all the challenges and it would ace them all completely. The final key element to make it a perfect would require it to have the ability to eternally repeat this process without any struggle at all.

    Speed and distance were the top 2 components of this projects, speed was required because a good push to get the axles moving so it would roll several feet without the power of the balloon and distance was needed for a good grade. To get good speed new balloons were constantly required to get that final push and very smooth axles and together half the distance would just be rolling with an empty balloon. But if the empty balloon landed on a wheel that would instantly stop it so placement of the balloon was also an important factor.

    On my best run my car started out strong and the balloon did most of the pushing and it worked out well but once the balloon ran out of air the axles got caught in the roll of tape  and that stopped it. One of my main focuses had been to get really smooth axles but I could never quite get it to work. When I got my best run I resorted to one of my original plans which was to have two air exhausts and other people had already been doing that and it seemed to make it go much farther than one exhaust. I think this made it go  farther because it was blowing air against the floor in a larger area and more all at once which resulted in an overall increase in speed and distance.

    Two problems faced in the prototyping process were having the balloon deflate and jam up in the wheels and the second was getting the car to go straight. To fix the balloon problem I tried to create barriers between the wheels and balloon but that didn’t work so I put the balloon as far away from the wheels as I could so that completely eliminated the problem. Getting the car to go straight was really just trial and error but to make sure that they wouldn’t wobble and turn was to make sure they were as straight as possible while they were on there tightly.

    A reality that I may have faced as a real life car designer would have been getting good mileage. The air in the balloon relates to the gas in the tank but the engine and the straws are what get the mileage. It depended on the design of how many miles per gallon the car will get and how much push the air provides to propel the car.

                                        Jet Car Effort Chart

    After completing this project it taught me about perseverance because I had to prototype
over and over again until I made the right one and I had to persevere through failure. It taught me a new way to persevere instead of persevering through one object I would move on past the failed object and make a new one which was a form of perseverance I wasn’t too familiar with. Something that gave a good motive to persevere was to not just get a good grade but to succeed at something which I had not yet done that.

    I plan to work harder, set higher goals, and perform better overall on the upcoming projects this year and hope to raise my grades a little higher hopefully up into the A range. I’m going to strive to focus harder in class by not talking as much or wondering off onto something totally random. I might do more after school work if i’m struggling in class and will reach out to others for help if I am struggling after that. More finesse might help because I felt like I was rushing through prototyping a little too much. I never gave myself time to step and take a look at what is going on and what should I do to improve my work. I think the next project will go fantastically if I follow everything I just said.