Gabby's science 8th grade

Monday, March 7, 2011

Our launch- March 4

Our eighth grade attempted to launch the balloon last Friday, March 4. While we were blowing up the balloon, 3 small holes appeared. This caused the balloon to not be able to lift as much weight. So, we had to take the container off the balloon. We just sent up the balloon with the parachute. We weren't able to put the iPhone or the FLIP camera in the container with the balloon. We are going to launch it again sometime this week.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Parachute Team update!!

Our parachute has been going really well! Our material finally came in, and while I was gone for a dance competition, the other girls made the spill hole. When I came back, we started creating the places on the outside of the parachute where we would put the rope connected to the container holding the FLIP camera and iPhone. So we created 4 places on the parachute where we made 3 holes. We sewed 3 washers onto the parachute where the hole was so there was a place to put the cord to connect the container and parachute. We folded part of the parachute over the washer (with a hole in it) to make it 2-ply. Then, we tested it. The places that were in between where the washers were (with the rope) flew up. So if the washers were like this:
OOO OOO

Then the space between them was flying up. So, we had to add 2 more small washers in between them to create space for more rope to connect the parachute and container...so now it looks like this:

OOO oo OOO

This seemed to work better! Hopefully the parachute will go smoothly because we are doing the official thing tomorrow at our Community Service project!

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

February 16th

Hey everybody! Today the people in 1st period who are in our group (Maybry, Elizabeth, and Gray) made a parachute and attached it to Ashley's group's container. They tested it this morning, and then we tested it again. It worked pretty well, and tells us a lot about how to make the actual one. The only thing that was that the spill hole was a little bit too big. If it was smaller, it would have slowed down even more than it already did. We will upload the video tomorrow during class...after we edit it because it is a little bit toooo long:) We figured out that the spill hole's size is extremely important to the parachute.

We will keep you updated!

Friday, February 11, 2011

Hoping this will be epic...

There is now an Irish dance movie coming out!!! Here is the trailer:

Jig movie

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Camera into space

Our eighth grade class is sending a camera into space! We are using a weather balloon. We have different teams working on different parts of the weather balloon and container and parachute. Zelle, Maybry, Elizabeth, Gray, and I are working on the parachute. We are planning on using Polyurethane Coated Ripstop Nylon. We are working on ordering it now. This is the type of design we are making it:

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Balloon Car

Balloon Racer

We finally got our balloon racer to work!!! Here are the calculations...

Mass: 100 grams

Acceleration: 0.24 m/s *squared*

Total net force: 24 N

Pictures:

Zelle was not too happy with me at the moment...

I think that we built like three different cars...and I broke one!!!

Description: Our balloon racer's body was made out of styrofoam and the wheels were CD's. To secure the wheels, there were Gatorade tops that kept them in lign. There were wooden dowels that were the axels for the wheels. At first, the body was made of cardboard, but it wasn't sturdy enough. It was also too heavy. The last thing that we did was put weights (20 grams) on the front to make sure that it went straight.