Today,
was the second meet up at James’ house. After the first failure, we decided to
approach the construction differently. Since the zinc-plated wire could not hold itself up,
we decided as a team to change the material to copper wire. Furthermore, we decided
to use a normal toy car instead of Kevin’s LEGO car as the cardboard track would be very hard to support (as the car would slide along both the top and the bottom of the track, making support at the bottom impossible without stopping the car). Hence, we had to shape our
5cm by 50cm cardboard strips differently, folding the vertical ends upright,
1cm from each edge. These edges were used as support to keep the car on track. Furthermore, supports could now be installed to beneath the track. Construction
was much more difficult than anticipated due to flimsy nature of cardboard and the walls not staying in place.
After shaping the copper wire into our rollercoaster design, we put the design
into test. Surprisingly, the copper was also unable to hold itself upright so
we had to use our hands to keep it in place. This enabled us to test the toy
car on cardboard. Once again, we ran into a few barriers. The car would
occasionally fall off the cardboard as the sides were flimsy and weak. It was
also unable to go up hills, potentially due to the fact that the material was very rough and was thus not appropriate. This idea was abandoned after spending a few hours to simply get the car to slide down a hill.
Assorted Cars
Ramp design
