Have you ever been to Disneyland, Disney World, Great America, Six Flags, Universal Studios or any amusement park? Have you ever seen the giant roller coasters that are towering over the people in the park? Have you ever been on them? The fun, thrilling and adventurous rides are made for all different types of daring people all over the world. But they take a lot of physics to make. With gravity-defying loops and corkscrews, hanging people and enormous hills and drops, they have people screaming on the top of their lungs, and scientists scratching their heads. One thing's for sure, if Isaac Newton was alive for the first roller coaster, he would have been the first person hired on the team. Newton's first three laws of physics are seen. The first law of an object in motion stays in motion is seen on the ride as the carts rush through until the end when they are acted upon by the friction, gravity and wind resistance. His second law of F=M*A is seen when calculating the force of the cart on the ride. Newton's third law of everything has an equal and opposite reaction is seen when the cart goes through the breathtaking loops as it goes up and down. This makes for an awesome end of the unit project for students studying physics and energy because of the hands-on building experience and real-life problems. Maybe we can do some more roller coaster design...
Backwards-Looking
I knew a lot about physics before I started this project. I had worked on this unit for a long time and knew how to do the calculations that I needed to do. I also knew how all of Newton’s laws of physics worked. This helped me when it was time to do the roller coaster project because I was able to do the calculations quickly and answer the questions easily. This helped me to overall finish the project even though I had no idea how to construct a roller coaster. I also had a lot of fun doing the sketches and the blueprint because that is something that comes easily to me on the whole.
Inwards-Looking
What satisfies me most about this project is that I was able to build a working and good looking roller coaster. This was very fun to do and I had a lot of creativity when coming up with possible themes and designs. I also had lots of fun and am overly satisfied with the way it looks. We sure decorated to heart's content. This was an amazing experience and I loved having the satisfaction of building the ride and decorating it to make it look really nice.
Outwards-Looking
In this project, my group followed the same criteria and constraints list and we did the same project, but we did ours a little bit different than other groups. For instance, our ride spends 95 percent of the time in the air. The whole structure was built with straws and Popsicle sticks, we had no cups in our design, we had no paper tunnels and many different hills. We also built our roller coaster really fast and spent a lot more time decorating then we did building it and trying to get it to work. Our process was similar though, this was because we did the calculations and questions last, sketched first and built second. This seemed to be the general way to do it.
Forwards-Looking
One thing I would like to improve upon is doing the calculations and the harder and more tedious things, before doing the fun parts and building. This is because we could have built the basic working structure, then done the calculations, then made any decorations or changes to the ride and update the calculations. That way we would have a basic outline or format and have it be easier to work with. It also would have helped us to not go so crazy with the theme and decor because that was not the main part of the project.
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