CATAPULT!!!!!

Bet ya' didn't know that I built one of those.  Unless... you read my Moms blog, I think that there is a post about it and my house on her blog.

 Well...

This is my Catapult.  My partner Kat (Featured below) and I were the only girls in a class full of about 20 boys, so of course we named our catapult LAS CHICAS!   Kat is an amazing partner, she is on our schools winning robotics team, and is going to be an Engineer after college.

This is also in Mr. Schmitdke's class! We started off the project with researching the best ways to build a catapult, and all of components that a catapult entails.  We had to keep a daily journal of our progress, which in the end turned in to a required 10 page paper on the project.

Not to go into too much detail, the requirements were that it had to fit in a shoe box, we could only use the supplies given to us, and it had to be released with one hand.

 Ours was the smallest catapult in the class, not to brag, but it also looked cooler then everyone else.  Just kidding there were some pretty intense designs.  With the help of the teacher and the the internet we put in ample supports so that a drop would not break it.  The above video is a launch of the catapult. Its technical name is a penny launcher because that is what it launches, but either name works.  

The penny launcher was graded on two tests.  The first was accuracy.  

 We had to aim for the mug in the center of the bulls-eye.  You had ten shots where each shot landed was the grade that you got.  The final grade was an average of all ten shots.  Our launcher got the penny into the 9 circle nine of the ten times and the last time it landed in the ten circle.  It got pretty close nicking the cup the final time.  Out final grade was a 99% the highest grade that anyone has ever gotten. I believe the mug is 15 feet away from the launching spot.

The second grade was distance.  We had one day to make adjustments to the launcher and then we saw how far we could fling the penny. With our extra wood, since our catapult was so small, we made an extra long arm.  In a practice round our penny flung 40 feet after hitting the ceiling and the wall. During the graded three launches we didn't get it that far, but we still got 30ish feet, (because we put to many rubber bands on it and broke it, and the repairs didn't hold well.) :) Mr. Schmidtke took he furthest of the three launches.  It was a ton of fun to build and test and was amazing to see what we could do with it!    

One day I will have to show you the monster truck that we made in another one of Schmidtke's classes. :)hehe!

 Thanks for reading!