Designing an accurate
Nina Harris, Thalia Ehrenpreis, Stella Martin, Mira Soskis, and Lily Edwards at Washington Latin Public CHarter School
Background: In this Physics project We Focused
On the Domain of Designing and Executing
Investigations. We Considered Potential Areas of
Error in The Different Designs until we found
something that we thought was Perfect. We
RecordEd our Data and Tried to Control our
Variables (The height of the support and Length of
the Arm,)to have the best result. After researching
the strengths and weaknesses of trebuchets, we
tried to incorporate a trebuchet inspired arm,
which has a long rane into a more accurate
counterweight firing mechanism.
Research objective: Try to get our catapult to fire
accurately and hit the center of the 10m circle
Materials: ● Copper Tube - $2
● Curtain rods-$0 (trash) ● 1 and ½ Bricks -$0 (trash)
● Rope - $10 ● Metal ROd - $0 (trash)
● Gorilla Glue - $6 Scotch Tape - $2
●
Figure 1: Initial design
v
catapult
5200 2nd St NW, Washington, DC 20011
design process: Data and results:
Figure 7:THe score sheet Figure 8:The flags
Figure 2:The base Figure 3:Completed stable frame Figure 4:The arm
v v
the Arm of the catapult has
The start of the catapult: the We took off the tape and added
been added
The final result WHere our Tennis Ball Landed On The The flags marking where our
base Made from curtain rods twine to make our base more
field and missed the target tennis ball landed
and Tape. secure
Conclusion:
● our objective wasn’t met because we couldn't
Figure 6: The final design
Figure 5:Firing mechanism make our catapult fire far enough and Accurately
enough to hit the target.
● Our design was highly flawed and we weren't able to
generate enough velocity to fire the tennis ball more
than a foot. In addition to that, the fact that we held our
catapult together with twine and super glue meant that it
was unstable and lost some of its accuracy.
● Our design changed from a cubical to a triangular
v
frame because we realized that it would increase the
v
stability of our catapult. Initially, our weight was
located on the axel that the arm was connected to, but
we decided to put it on the arm instead to increase the
power the weight could generate
acknowledgments/references: We’d like to thank
the Wasserman Harris family for our workspace and
Our counterweight was added so once
Stella and thalia spending the majority of our material donations.
quality time with curtain Catapult Physics - The Trebuchet. (n.d.). Real World Physics Problems. Retrieved December
the string is releases it will pull rodapault (Clarence.) 16, 2022, from https://www.real-world-physics-problems.com/catapult-physics.html
forward and the ball will be shot out of
the catapult Milner, W. (2017, April 12). How to Make a Catapult Shoot Straight. Our Pastimes.
Retrieved December 16, 2022, from
https://ourpastimes.com/make-catapult-shoot-straight-10017410.html
Bartnik, T. (n.d.). How to Build a Trebuchet (with Pictures). wikiHow. Retrieved December
16, 2022, from https://www.wikihow.com/Build-a-Trebuchet