Catapult Project Reflection

To start off this project, we had to define the problem. For this problem we had to build a catapult that was able to shoot a ball into a basket from three different points. Next we had to brainstorm. To do this we sketched different catapults in our engineering journal. After this, we had to research. We researched different ways to build the catapult and different designs of catapults. A lot of kids in my class decided to do the Da Vinci catapult, but I did not. Our catapult also had criteria and constraints to go along with it. It had to fit within a 1 foot by 1 foot bock, we had to use less than 15 craft sticks and 5 rubber bands. I decided to go with a simpler catapult than the Da Vinci catapult because in eighth grade, I made a simpler catapult that worked well, so I wanted to do something similar to that. It was pretty small, but the way it was designed make it work well.

The next step was to start the process of building. I had to list out all the materials I needed for my catapult. Then, I had to draw out my prototype, which was two full-scale drawings. The full-scale drawing included the side view of my catapult and another list of the materials I needed. During the time of building my full scale drawing, I started to drift away from my initial first idea. I made a lot of changes to try and make the catapult more efficient. After I was finished with my full scale drawing, I had to start building my actual catapult. The process of building my catapult didn’t take that long since I did have a simpler design. My catapult did turn out really small, and looked very simple compared to everyone else’s. I didn’t think that it was going to work. After I had my finished product, I had to test it. The first product I had built didn’t work as well as I thought it would. I had to improve it so that it could shoot at more of an angle instead of straight as it was doing. To do this, I drilled holes into my catapult and inserted a screw to make the catapult stop at a certain angle to have it shoot at more of an angle. After doing this, the catapult did start making more baskets.