Last time we were in tech, we practiced using the ceramic cutters to make clean cuts. Next week in tech, we are going to be making cams, and our cams are going to perform a simple task. So far, we don’t know much about this project, except that we are going to be cutting out shapes from automata templates made of cardstock to build these. From what we’ve seen so far, these look really cool and satisfying. Looking forward to next week’s project!

Our latest project in tech 6 was building catapults. There were videos with different options of different kinds of catapults we could build. After building the catapult, we measured the effort arm, the load arm, and the mechanical advantage. We also got to create a game with our catapults, then we each made a short video explaining the measurements and the game. Overall it was another fun project, and helped me understand better about the different kinds of levers we learned about.

This week in tech 6, we did two projects. One was the I beam project we started last week, and one was the truss project we started yesterday. The I beam project was really fun, we got to use cardboard to design an I beam, and test it against a standard I beam. For the truss project we used baby carrots and toothpicks to design a structure and see how many books the structure could hold before failing. Both projects were really fun!