Building

We started building our prototypes today. After realizing my first draft of our scooter would not work (since it would have no wheels, which would make to vehicle have A LOT of friction), we started building the car in draft #2. So far, it is really flimsy, but I am hoping that will not matter since it only needs to hold a balloon… hopefully the balloon doesn't blow all over the place and take the vehicle with it! Right now it’s too early to find out... this vehicle could either work fantastically or be an epic fail. 

Day 2: Starting the Construction

For the second meeting of our building project, Shivani and I asked beforehand to borrow a hotglue gun from Mr. Villavicencio's class earlier in the day; we've aquired a pink hotglue gun and two
rolls(?cylinders?) of solid glue. I've put them into my safekeeping until I went to Shivani's house. At her home, we got started on creating the mini prototypes and then to the actual vehicles.
Our choice of materials were toothpicks and using CDs as the wheels. There are some pros and cons to these items.

Pros:

• vehicle will be light and will have a very small intertia
• less resistance to movement/change
• can possibly travel far
• wheels will be sturdy
• won't break easily
• small air resistance

Cons:

• structure may be too light/weak
• could fall apart/break
• toothpicks don't have much mass
• small momentum=inability to travel far
• CDs can't travel
• not enough friction to even move across tiles

Some problems were occured during this meeting. One would have to be the glue that kept--accidentally-- burning us, causing our hand to shake, leading to the breakage of toothpicks. The dried glue strings were also a hassle, but were capable to being used as "ropes" to tie corners of toothpicks together. At this point, the thought of using pencils being the structure and axels of the vehicles was vaguely considered.