The TKAM Roller Coaster was our first large project of the year. Everything up to this point - including the previous projects on this page - was either leading up to, or a part of, this project. It was integrated, meaning that it was from both core classes, Humanities and Physics, and thus it is on both DP pages. You can read about it on either one; they were both based off of the same questions. In Physics, we studied kinematics (specifically the conservation of energy), and constructed our roller coasters so that the marbles that we used in place of cars could run all the way through without help from outside, working only on what energy the marbles had. In Humanities, we red the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, and created at least five scenes from the book to decorate the coaster. We also attempted to construct the coaster in such a way that the track represented the path of the life of a character from the novel.
I worked in a group of three on this project. My group members were Annette Garcia and Nadia Kireyko. This group had a few difficulties; the largest was probably the distribution of work. I am rather assertive in group work, and I tend to take control. I had a clear vision of what I wanted the roller coaster to look like, and I'm afraid that I attempted to do things in the coaster that my group members didn't quite understand. I had to go through each step of the project with my group members in order for us to complete a model, or the coaster, so we moved rather more slowly than I would have liked. Still, the roller coaster turned out quite well, so our group must have worked reasonably efficiently.
We modeled our coaster off of a character from the book named Atticus Finch, who was both a defense attorney and the father of Scout - the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird - and her brother, Jem. We had to take the story of Atticus' experiences throughout the book and put that in roller coaster form; that is to say, we had to make the motion of the coaster equal the motion of Atticus' emotions and reactions to his experiences. For example, we modeled the scene in the book where Atticus had to take a stand in front of the jailhouse to defend Tom Robinson, and because everything spiraled out of control from that point on, we put a funnel immediately following that model.
Our five models came from scenes in Atticus' experience throughout the book that we thought were both important and reflected our theme: There are some things that one simply cannot control. Our five models were: a mailbox in which Atticus received the letter ordering him to defend Tom Robinson in court, because he did not get to choose whether or not he did so; the Finch House and the Radley house next to each other, because as the book went on, Atticus began to learn that he could not distance the children from their fascination of Boo Radley; the public jailhouse, because Atticus could not control the feelings of the men who intended to hurt Tom Robinson; the courthouse, because Atticus clearly held no sway in the secret courts of men's hearts that day; and, finally, the prison yard where Tom Robinson was shot, because, although Atticus tried, he could not stop Tom Robinson from trying to break free.
My group had a major difficulty with the physics side of the project; when we originally designed the blueprint for our coaster, we did not take into account energy lost due to friction. We also did our calculations incorrectly. The result was that we spent two full days trying to get a feature of our roller coaster to work at all before we finally just got rid of it and started over. By that time, we were far behind schedule. Fortunately, we were able to catch up, due to no small amount of effort and some work outside of school. On the upside, I figured out exactly what the conservation of energy means for roller coasters, and I can now design any roller coaster, and some very complicated ones, and as long as they meet one strict requirement they will work. Unfortunately, my revelation came after we had finished building the roller coaster.
Our work ethic was not the best. Aside from wasting two days on a feature that turned out to be hopeless, our progress was slow, since almost everything that we built had to be tweaked over and over again. The complexity of our design did not help matters, but I think that we had problems both with the speed at which we constructed our roller coaster and the capability with which we balanced the physics and humanities sides. This last was mostly due to some difficulties we ran into when we tried to take the modeling work home; namely, we couldn't get anything done, and it all had to be done in class, which led to some nasty time crunches. All in all, this was a very stressful project, and I am well pleased with the final product, especially considering what our group went through to obtain it.
If I could redesign one part of this project, I would give everyone more time to build the coasters! This was not an easy project, and we only had a couple of weeks that could actually be used for building. The other two-thirds of the project was spent on planning and designing. We were able to begin building the humanities models earlier than the coaster, but I think that it should have been the other way around, since the coaster was such a large final product compared to the models.
I worked in a group of three on this project. My group members were Annette Garcia and Nadia Kireyko. This group had a few difficulties; the largest was probably the distribution of work. I am rather assertive in group work, and I tend to take control. I had a clear vision of what I wanted the roller coaster to look like, and I'm afraid that I attempted to do things in the coaster that my group members didn't quite understand. I had to go through each step of the project with my group members in order for us to complete a model, or the coaster, so we moved rather more slowly than I would have liked. Still, the roller coaster turned out quite well, so our group must have worked reasonably efficiently.
We modeled our coaster off of a character from the book named Atticus Finch, who was both a defense attorney and the father of Scout - the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird - and her brother, Jem. We had to take the story of Atticus' experiences throughout the book and put that in roller coaster form; that is to say, we had to make the motion of the coaster equal the motion of Atticus' emotions and reactions to his experiences. For example, we modeled the scene in the book where Atticus had to take a stand in front of the jailhouse to defend Tom Robinson, and because everything spiraled out of control from that point on, we put a funnel immediately following that model.
Our five models came from scenes in Atticus' experience throughout the book that we thought were both important and reflected our theme: There are some things that one simply cannot control. Our five models were: a mailbox in which Atticus received the letter ordering him to defend Tom Robinson in court, because he did not get to choose whether or not he did so; the Finch House and the Radley house next to each other, because as the book went on, Atticus began to learn that he could not distance the children from their fascination of Boo Radley; the public jailhouse, because Atticus could not control the feelings of the men who intended to hurt Tom Robinson; the courthouse, because Atticus clearly held no sway in the secret courts of men's hearts that day; and, finally, the prison yard where Tom Robinson was shot, because, although Atticus tried, he could not stop Tom Robinson from trying to break free.
My group had a major difficulty with the physics side of the project; when we originally designed the blueprint for our coaster, we did not take into account energy lost due to friction. We also did our calculations incorrectly. The result was that we spent two full days trying to get a feature of our roller coaster to work at all before we finally just got rid of it and started over. By that time, we were far behind schedule. Fortunately, we were able to catch up, due to no small amount of effort and some work outside of school. On the upside, I figured out exactly what the conservation of energy means for roller coasters, and I can now design any roller coaster, and some very complicated ones, and as long as they meet one strict requirement they will work. Unfortunately, my revelation came after we had finished building the roller coaster.
Our work ethic was not the best. Aside from wasting two days on a feature that turned out to be hopeless, our progress was slow, since almost everything that we built had to be tweaked over and over again. The complexity of our design did not help matters, but I think that we had problems both with the speed at which we constructed our roller coaster and the capability with which we balanced the physics and humanities sides. This last was mostly due to some difficulties we ran into when we tried to take the modeling work home; namely, we couldn't get anything done, and it all had to be done in class, which led to some nasty time crunches. All in all, this was a very stressful project, and I am well pleased with the final product, especially considering what our group went through to obtain it.
If I could redesign one part of this project, I would give everyone more time to build the coasters! This was not an easy project, and we only had a couple of weeks that could actually be used for building. The other two-thirds of the project was spent on planning and designing. We were able to begin building the humanities models earlier than the coaster, but I think that it should have been the other way around, since the coaster was such a large final product compared to the models.