Nerdy Derby

Recently in school we did something called a Nerdy Derby. A Nerdy derby is when you create cars and then race them. Two people came in to talk to us about how a Nerdy Derby works, what we should do and what materials we would use. To start creating our car we would have a smooth and thin piece of wood (body). Second you need two small metal poles (Axel) and four wheels. You put the wheels on the end of the Axel and glue it to the wood and you have a car.

You could either work alone or with a partner to make your car. I worked with Erik to create our car. Once we got the car ready we added styrofoam to the top to make it more aerodynamic which makes it faster.

We raced and won! We raced again and again and we kept winning, until we raced Alex. We hadn’t raced Alex before but thought we would win again. Wrong. He beat us by a lot. We started to think how we could make it faster.

We decided to make our car heavier so it would go downhill quicker. We added a plastic pipe on top and wanted to see if that would work. We raced and won. We kept racing and winning until we went against Alex again. I got nervous again. Would our car beat his? Our would we lose again? One of the guys held both of our cars. He counted down 3 2 1. He let them go. His made it down faster but our went up faster but then… he beat us down. He had won. I was so annoyed that we had lost again. It was time to clean up and we had failed. But then I realized we didn’t. We came 2nd in the class and that is not bad. That is really good. So I was fine that we lost because we still came second.

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