The Lego car challenge
By Niagara Class In News, Year 6, Year 6 Pupil BlogIt was great to learn about the types of energy and about frictioan. Potential energy is when force moves the car by itself for example when the car goes down the ramp. Kinetic energy is if when the car is pushed or given a unnatural boost, for example if you give it a boost when it goes down the ramp. Friction is what slows the car to a stop, if there was no friction the car would keep going forever.
The aim of the competition is to create a car that will go the furthest when it comes of the ramp. Our team is called the Destructors and we were against ten other groups including: Fast and furious and Kilimanjaro. When we first decided to work together as a team we started to think about our design straight away. We took it very seriously because we wanted our car to succeed.
Our car design
we think our car is unique. the base of it was twelve by eight studs wide. Our car was kind of like a forklift truck, we decided to make the front of the car with tusk like tips that were very long. This was because the measurement of how far your car went was from the nose. We figured that if our car nose was very long we would get a good score, in fact if we didn’t add the tusks we wouldn’t have won. Our car colours were rainbow like except for some features like the black front. Every time we added a new feature we did another practice run to see if it improved the car. We tried to make our car the perfect weight but we were worried it was slightly too heavy, however we couldn’t find a way to fix this problem so, to make it better we made it aero-dynamic.
On the race track
We were the third team to find out what our score was. Team one, The Dream Team, made an outstanding score and we were afraid they would beat us. We were so happy when we beat them by five centimeters. On the ramp, when we let go of our car we were worried it would crash into the sides of the ramp as when we our car did practice runs we had a theory that there was more weight on one side so we fixed it but there was no time to test our fixed car. It was very tense watching other cars go of the ramp, we were hoping they would not beat our score of 139cm. when the last car went they did not go past our car and we celebrated as we won out of year six and were probably going to the finals in Gladesmore.
g