Day 05 - Refine the Design

Yesterday you collected data on your car's performance. Today you will analyze that data and use it to refine your design. Some of you will have data pools for more than one variant of your car; use ALL that data - more data is better.

I will demonstrate for you how to use Google Sheets to crunch the data and present you with meaningful graphs. It is much easier to get meaningless graphs than meaningful graphs, so give this some good thought as you move through the work. You want your graph to show you clear trends that you can then talk about as the story of your engineering accomplishments.

After you have analyzed your data, it is time to redesign your car. Some of you will make minor modifications, but others will be well served by rebuilding their car from scratch. Understand that tomorrow you will be testing again and that Friday you will write up your EDP while I am out for the day. Make sure you ask me any questions you have before Friday!

acceleration

the rate at which an object's speed changes

compression

squeezing an object to reduce the space it occupies

intuit

to know something without prior study

Newton's laws of motion

they remind us that objects need force to change direction or velocity, and that every force in the universe is opposed by its equal; also, F=ma, or force equals mass times acceleration

pneumatics

any technology using air pressure to do work