Completion of Note Card Structure Challenge!

Its been a busy week for Hunter and James but we have been working diligently on our note card tower.  Last weekend Hunter went on a college visit to Colorado, so James decided to work on the final tower construction. During the three day weekend, he cracked open a new stack of 100 crisp 3 by 5's and went to work rolling them into cylinders.  He quickly learned the most efficient way was to roll them around a bic pen, then inside out the resulting spiral.  On Monday he began the process of note card settling.  During tests at Logan's, Logan and Erario noticed an additive impact to the stability of the tower with the added levels of note cards.  This was found to be the small imperfections in the cylindrical supports.  James wanted to remove these imperfections from the picture.  To do this he made the first levels days before the attempt for the tallest tower.  He started by carefully setting up a 3 story tower with 6 supports per level and 2 horizontal, unfolded cards for surface area.

The next day, Tuesday, James continued to add to the tower, building it up to 5 levels, or 15 in.

The following morning, Wednesday, James went big and stacked 9 layers of note cards, a whopping 27 in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFcXcfUrvVg

That evening, Hunter went to James' house to finish up the project.  First they added one more layer to sum up to 10 layers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JstEXq9VS9k

After this they were feeling good and decided to go for 11 layers.  Unfortunately, our first two attempts were unsuccessful. 

Attempt 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q9hQmgZgb8

Attempt 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8P-tQH3XrY

Hunter noticed that some of the supports were not directly above the supports under them so he went about fixing them with the assistance of James.  After these cards were in a more structurally sound position, they proceeded to attempt 11 layers once more! The video speaks for itself!

~33 in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S-AiXjXKIo

Mousetrap Car

Today James and I watched a few youtube videos of mousetrap cars that have been built by other people.  We see flaws in some and components of others that seem to work well.  We are planning on working this weekend on finalizing the notecard structure which will hopefully stand strong!  Also we would like to get a jump on the mousetrap car and get through a rough testing and planning phase for that project.

Note Card Vertical Extension Attempts

·      Today we decided that we were slightly off task in our goals.  We were trying to build the strongest supports for our tower, but we did not focus on the stability past one level.  With this in mind James accidentally came across a new support design in the shape of a cylinder.  He was rolling a note card onto a pen when it was not going very straight.  When he rolled it from the other end the already curled other end wrapped around the outside. This effect was duplicated by unwinding and rewinding existing spiral supports switching the inside and outside.

·      We moved away from the structure of four cylinders stacked repeatedly with a notecard in between. And we decided that a six card support system is a lot more stable and does not compromise too many cards needed to stack the textbook as high as possible. The pics show a start to a successful support system. We are thinking in our next session we will try to go for gold and use one hundred notecards to construct the final product. And if it fails, it will just be another testing day!

The revolutionary cylindrical support!

 First multi-level testing

 Our tallest 4 support tower we tried

 Tallest structure we constructed that held the APES textbook.

Tallest structure we made.  It did not work before James had to leave.