Creative Engineering
For this project, I worked with Lara Fleischhauer, Isabella Madison, and Zack Griggy.
The assignment was to come up with something that would help solve a world problem. The problem we decided to focus on was flooding. We came up with the solution of armoring levees with grass so that the roots could strengthen them. Below is a link to our presentation, which includes pictures and videos of our tests. (To play the videos click on the image and it will take you to YouTube)
Physics Concepts
We didn't really use any physics concepts in this project, but we did use math to figure out the cost.
Those calculations were:
Average cost per mile: $10,000
52 pound bag of grass seed: $6,500
All of the labor: $3,500.
The labor includes five teams of three. One to prepare the dirt, one to plant the grass seeds, and one to water them. We would then have a team of five people come back five times in three weeks to water the grass.
We also had to find the slope of the dirt for our tests.
Reflection
There were many things that went well during this project, but there were also things that went poorly.
One thing that went extremely well was our testing. We were able to finish that in one day, and the results were very clear. We could tell that the dirt eroded very fast, and the dirt protected with grass eroded much more slowly. Another thing that went very well was our time management. We finished our designing and testing very early, and we had plenty of time to work on our presentation. As a result, the slides we showed were aesthetically pleasing and had the right amount of information on them.
One thing that went badly was the presentation itself. We didn't practice it that much, so we were slightly unprepared to present. We didn't say things as well as we could have, and some people over-explained things and talked a little too much. Another thing that didn't go well was our communication. We had several arguments over solutions and presentation, and this slowed our timeline and made it harder to get things done. However, I think our presentation was very good in the end.
Below is our Google Slides presentation.
The assignment was to come up with something that would help solve a world problem. The problem we decided to focus on was flooding. We came up with the solution of armoring levees with grass so that the roots could strengthen them. Below is a link to our presentation, which includes pictures and videos of our tests. (To play the videos click on the image and it will take you to YouTube)
Physics Concepts
We didn't really use any physics concepts in this project, but we did use math to figure out the cost.
Those calculations were:
Average cost per mile: $10,000
52 pound bag of grass seed: $6,500
All of the labor: $3,500.
The labor includes five teams of three. One to prepare the dirt, one to plant the grass seeds, and one to water them. We would then have a team of five people come back five times in three weeks to water the grass.
We also had to find the slope of the dirt for our tests.
Reflection
There were many things that went well during this project, but there were also things that went poorly.
One thing that went extremely well was our testing. We were able to finish that in one day, and the results were very clear. We could tell that the dirt eroded very fast, and the dirt protected with grass eroded much more slowly. Another thing that went very well was our time management. We finished our designing and testing very early, and we had plenty of time to work on our presentation. As a result, the slides we showed were aesthetically pleasing and had the right amount of information on them.
One thing that went badly was the presentation itself. We didn't practice it that much, so we were slightly unprepared to present. We didn't say things as well as we could have, and some people over-explained things and talked a little too much. Another thing that didn't go well was our communication. We had several arguments over solutions and presentation, and this slowed our timeline and made it harder to get things done. However, I think our presentation was very good in the end.
Below is our Google Slides presentation.