Motion Project (Reina, Jordan, Sabrina) Day 2

Day 2


Today we decided to maybe start a little bit smaller.  So if you look at pictures from our Day 1 you will see that our house is pretty large.  Also if you were to lift it up you would see it is also heavy.  So we needed to test our 'balloons making house lift' theory on something smaller.  We made a small house, about an eighth of the weight. Then we filled up some balloons with helium and tied them to the house one at a time.  We thought that with maybe ten balloons the house would lift off of the ground.  We were wrong.  We tied all thirty balloons on and nothing happened.  Well, actually, something did happen.  The weight of the house dropped from 170 grams with no balloons to 120 with thirty balloons.  After some math we figured it would take 72 balloons to lift the small house off the table.  And what about the big house you ask?  572 balloons.  Yeah, that's a lot of balloons.  So I guess today our small house got promoted to our big house. 


Day 2 Pictures

Day 2 Video

Motion Project (Reina, Jordan, and Sabrina)

Supplies:

• Cardboard
• String
• Balloons
• Helium
• Duct Tape

Objective: To build a house and lift it two meters using balloons filled with helium.

Where we got the idea: If you have seen the movie Up, well then that is where we got our idea.  If you haven't, well in the movie the most adorable elderly gentleman ties a ton of balloons to his house in order to take flight.  He lifts his house off the ground and simply flies away.  So we are making a small scale model of that, and trying to figure out how and why it works.
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Day 1: Today we focused on building our house.  We took some cardboard boxes and constructed what looks more like a barn than a house, but none the less it will serve our purpose.  Then we poked holes in the roof so we could tie string to the house.  We will then tie baloons filled with helium to these strings, and off our little barn/house should fly.  We then measured our house and weighed it.  This was the data we collected: 


House measurements: .4318 meters wide  .3556 meters high  .4826 meters deep
House Weight:  1 lb and 14.68 oz.


This is all we did today, due to our lack of balloons filled with helium, but we are one step closer to sending our house into orbit (or 2 meters into the air...same thing).


Day 1 Pictures:

Activity Model for Inquiry (Reina, Jordan, and Sabrina)

So far for our experiment we have-

1. Made observations- we made numerous observations about the candle's weight, look, color, limitations, abilities, etc.
2. Formed the question- does a candle produce enough heat to cook an egg, a thinly sliced piece of ham, and a pancake?
3. Defined the problem- how do you construct an oven with candles that will cook all the things we want to cook.
4. Investigated the known- we looked on the internet to get ideas on how to make a candle oven.
5. Articulated expectation- we hypothesised that in order to cook a piece of meat it needed to be thinly sliced, the egg and pancake also needed to be relatively thin, and we would need an adequate amount of candles to provide enough heat.

Complex Moving of the Bean (Day Two/Final Day)

How to move a bean (or multiple beans) one meter up and one meter over.  This was the question that baffled us, up until the final day.  The basic construction of our device was a counterweight system.  We placed a meter stick  in the sink and tied a rubber band around it near the top.  Then we placed a cup in the rubber band, and a bean in the cup.  Next we taped a box behind the meter stick on the counter, and rigged up another ruler on top of the box.  Finally we set up the counterweight system with a paperclip on one side (with a bean attached to it) and a bag of pinto beans on the other.  In theory, what was supposed to happen was we would drop the bag of beans, this would raise up the paperclip with the bean, and also hit the ruler.  The ruler would fly up and hit the up with enough force that it would send the bean inside flying at least a meter.  This worked only about 2-5% of the time, but that's at least better than 0%.  Below are pictures and a video showing what we constructed (early apologies about the video being sideways).