By Kathy Kurtz Ferrari
Contributing Writer
4/3/08
Innovative young engineers have found a new use for those old vinyl record albums collecting dust in basements: they make great wheels for the latest design in cars built from mousetraps.
The records were just one of the materials high school students in physics classes used to build cars powered by a standard-sized mousetrap. For two-and-a-half weeks, the juniors and seniors worked on designing aerodynamic mousetrap-powered miniature vehicles for what became known around the school as the “Mousetrap Car Olympics.”
Students worked in teams of two to three and used things like CDs, drawer knobs, checkers, jar lids, aspirin bottles, wood blocks, boxes, and pencils to fashion cars that would be fast, powerful and travel the longest distance. Legos, rubber bands and powered motors were not allowed as students were challenged to be as creative as possible by their teachers, Tom Shaw and Paul Damiani.
The “Mousetrap Car Olympics” were held on March 26 and 27 outside the physics classroom and spectators, young and old, lined the corridor as each competing vehicle wound its engine at the starting line. Points were tallied for maximum average velocity, strength in climbing an inclined plane of 3.5 degrees and longest distance traveled. Grades were awarded depending on how the vehicle fared during the competition.
“This project is a real-world assessment. It’s a test for the real world,” says Shaw. “If they go to work for an engineering firm, they have to work with other co-workers on a project. We put the kids in groups that normally wouldn’t work together. That’s a skill that we don’t always teach.”
The students went through countless redesigns, often working late into the night to get things perfect. One group found that they needed more weight, so they mounted a saltshaker to the body, which made it look almost like a little driver was operating the vehicle.
Jacky Wan and Julia Hanna needed to find the right fit for the wheels.
“At first we used bigger wheels because we thought it would be better, but then we found it wasn’t,” says Wan.
“In theory it should have worked,” laughs Hanna.
Their vehicle, using cabinet drawer knobs as wheels, did fairly well.
In total, 140 students designed cars for the challenge and no two cars looked quite the same. The only thing they had in common was that a mousetrap powered them.