Empowering Student Innovation for a Clean Energy Future
Winter Spring High School’s Energy Trans-bears!
From Plans to Reality:
Our initial plan is roughly sketched above- we had our end goal of lighting a small Christmas tree in mind and the minimum energy transfers and electricity requirements in mind.Despite our plans, the final product of our energy transfer machine was incredibly more complex than we had initially planned or hoped for. We noticed that our machine’s runtime (meant to be 1 minute) was far too short, and added much more steps and complexity. This also forced us to change the location of the electricity-powered transfer.
Steps of our Energy Transfer Machine:
To begin, a marble travels down a marble run (transferring potential energy to kinetic), and rolls to hit a button and activate the electric train. Once the electric train finishes traveling in its circular path, a frontal attachment hits and knocks over a train of dominoes (transferring kinetic energy from the train to each domino, then the next, etc.) Finally, the dominoes knock over a larger wooden block attached to a string. The string then pulls down a cardboard divider, allowing the first car to move forward (transferring its potential energy to kinetic) and allowing it to hit another car, which is also attached to a string,The string attached to the car then pulls the lever on the marble run in order to allow it to roll (transferring energy from potential to kinetic) and then the marble hits another train of dominoes which knocks over a larger block attached to the light switch. Once this block falls onto the other side, it acts as a makeshift pulley to drag the light switch upward and turn on the Christmas tree.
All of that makes our final machine!
Thank you to our amazing team and sponsors! Go Bears!
Great use of strings to transfer the energy (and action) from one area to another….and flipping a switch is not one of the easier things to do in these kind of contraptions. Great work!
Great use of your space and your ability to fill up a minute with interesting transfers. I liked how the energy was transferred up, down, and back up again near the end through the use of the strings.
i love how you edited the girl’s face on the christmas tree!! so creative guys
This was so close to being 1 minute. The train with the stick that started the domino run was a very clever idea. Great job!
Love the website! Well done!
Great use of strings to transfer the energy (and action) from one area to another….and flipping a switch is not one of the easier things to do in these kind of contraptions. Great work!
Very nice job ladies, representing WSHS well =)!
Great use of your space and your ability to fill up a minute with interesting transfers. I liked how the energy was transferred up, down, and back up again near the end through the use of the strings.
Amazing!!!!! Great Work!