Project Issues

[namedphoenix]

Ok, so I got these great projects from my friend - a bunch of stuff scanned in from someone she met or learned from (or whatever) at a MESA (Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Achievement) conference/training.

The instructions are as such:

Brown Bag Project:  Paper Car

Using three 5/7 index cards, four paper clips, and tape, make a wheeled vehicle

Comments

[shaharazad]

Can you simply bend the cards into on big wheel held together by the clips?

[wcg]

My very thought.

[namedphoenix]

THAT is why you get the big bucks! I sometimes think I'm not a scientist, because I always have my thinking constrained by unstated assumptions. Like, I just assumed that "vehicle" meant that it had to have a car like body, and stuff. But no where in the instructions does it say it has to look like a car!

[jillmotts]

Pretty sure you'll need scissors for an efficient wheel!

I found this page: http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/process_of_science/examples/papercar.html that actually uses the cars for multiple projects, the first being a study of the scientific method. (I did a google search for: "paper car" "index cards" "paper clips" tape).

[namedphoenix]

Your googlefu is waaay better than mine, I was unable to get any results, because I was only searching MESA projects, MESA Brown Bag Projects, and stuff like that. I got a lot of hits on food banks, and Arizona. :)

These are great links! I just wish there were some pictures to show my kids!

NERD ALERT!!!

[jillmotts]

So Bill and I spent some quality time together this evening making paper cars. We used scissors. His was way more successful than mine. Anyway, I took a few pictures and some video and put them on photobucket, totally public to anyone.

http://s156.photobucket.com/albums/t2/jillmotts/web%20stuff

[wcg]

Working from only the instructions you've cited, I'd bend the three index cards into one big wheel, held together at the junctions by paper clips and tape. Then I'd let it roll down the ramp and halfway across the room.

If there's some other rule in there requiring the use of the paper clips as axles then I'd use one index card as the "body" of the car, bending two paper clips into straight bars that I'd poke through the card so as to have an inverted U-shaped thing with axle ends sticking out of the sides. I'd use the two remaining cards to make wheels by:

-- folding and then tearing each card in half
-- repeatedly folding the resulting rectangles into cones, starting with a crease along the long axis
-- tearing off the excess paper after I'd gotten the paper folded into as tight a cone as I could, thus fashioning a wheel
-- poking my axles through the center of each wheel

That would give you something that would roll, but the big paper wheel would roll further.

[namedphoenix]

So the wheels are cones, like on a rail car? Do the points of the cones face in or out?

I was stuck by thinking that there needed to be a "body" of the car, too. But nothing in the instructions keeps that idea out. Jill linked to several different variations of the project which do outline things about the cars being able to transport erasers, and stuff.

[wcg]

I'd have the points inboard, just to keep the rims of the wheels from rubbing against the body. If, of course, there needs to be a body at all.