The Champs – Lakewood Senior High School

Brady W. (10th) and Hesham H.(10th)

Design Process of Our Machine:

Our earliest prototype was a quickly drawn sketch of all of the energy transfers that we would use in our machine. Our machine has changed slightly since that drawing was made.

While building this machine, we only faced two major challenges. Limited time, and setting up our dominos. Since we were only able to work on the project in class, we would have limited time each period to work. Due to this, we faced our second major challenge, and that was setting up the dominos. We were able to increase our domino laying speed by having both of us lay dominos at once.

We believe that the most interesting and complex part of our machine is the mechanism we used to hit a hot wheels car down a track with a golf ball (Energy Transfer 2). Our issue was the the golf ball would keep rolling down the track with the hot wheels car, knocking over all of the dominos in an unorderly fashion. To fix this, we cut a piece of plastic off of the hot wheels track container, and taped it down to both sides of the hot wheels track, making a barrier that the hot wheels car could rest under, but also one that the golf ball would stop when it hit.

Since we took so long to build the machine, we also have many photos of the construction:

Machine Energy Transfers:

First, our machine uses electricity using a 3 volt motor to push a golf ball down a hot wheels track.

For our second energy transfer, the rolling golf ball hits a hot wheels car, and pushes that car down the track.

For our third energy transfer, our hot wheels car hits a role of packing tape, and rolls along a table.

For our fourth energy transfer, the roll of packing tape hits a domino to start a long chain of dominoes.

For our fifth energy transfer, a domino knocks over a battery, which then slides down a hot wheels ramp.

For our sixth energy transfer which is also our team specified action, the battery rolls down the hot wheels ramp, landing on the space bar of a computer, playing a YouTube video.