Sunday, March 23, 2008

Dry Dock Movie

A look back at what we did in class when we began testing our boats. These pictures were taken over the course of a number of days around Lake Washburn for the Yacht Design Invitational. Students created boats that they designed in autodesk inventor after sketching them in their notebooks, and building them in Styrofoam.

This may seem a simple task, but these students had to create a curved symmetrical boat hull with a hot wire cutting tool, glue, small wooden dowels, wax paper, some sheet metal, toothpicks, and and hobby saws--no tape. This was especially challenging when it came to the sail, as we normally depend upon tape for everything.

As you can see in this video, the students went through the rapid prototyping process immediately into testing and the iterations of redesign for each design challenge:
  1. Speed
  2. Distance
  3. Weight-bearing
  4. Stability
  5. General purpose.
In order to come up with the general purpose outcomes, we created a table and charted performance, using descriptive statistics (mean averages).

2 comments:

  1. Neat project. The idea of multiple iterations of the same vessel corresponds somewhat to what I'm trying to do in a creative writing project in English 11 right now: create the different, distinct pieces of a story and try them out in different arrangements, try writing the same paragraph in first-person and third-person, etc. Wish we had a lake to sit around while we do it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Joe!

    You can borrow our lake now that our unit is done.

    ReplyDelete