The cardboard boat challenge
2 weeks ago we got a brief in class, the brief was to make a cardboard boat out of 4 by 8 piece of cardboard and one role of duck tape. There was 10 teams and each team get only one 4 by 8 sheet of cardboard and one role of duck tape. Each team was to come up with a design of a cardboard boat, after finishing the boat all the team go to a pool and race the boats that they made. Since the boats were made out of cardboard most boats would be ruined by the end of the race, the boats were only be able to be used once.
My partner and I had to design a boat the would hold weight and go through water at the same time. We first thought the project was not even possible, but our teacher said the he has done it in the past. So my teammate and I deiced to go on YouTube and look at some videos on the cardboard boat challenge after seeing other students form different school do it we realized that the challenge is possible.
Here is the link to the video that we saw
My partner and I had to design a boat the would hold weight and go through water at the same time. We first thought the project was not even possible, but our teacher said the he has done it in the past. So my teammate and I deiced to go on YouTube and look at some videos on the cardboard boat challenge after seeing other students form different school do it we realized that the challenge is possible.
Here is the link to the video that we saw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz_Cm9XygYU
Ideas
After watching the video we learned that after you put your boat in the water, in couple minutes the boat would start to sink. Since the boat it made out of the cardboard we only have couple of minutes before it gets ruined. We deiced to cover as much of the boat with duck type so the cardboard would not get ruined. We also deiced to make the front of the boat to be pointy of in a shape of a triangle so that it would cut through water more faster, after coming up with those two ideas we made the back pointy to because the boat can turn depending on the water so if the boat does turn then it can still cut through water. Because of limited amount of cardboard we had the back point was a little smaller then the front point.
Sketches
To come up with a design we started by sketching all the ideas that came to mind. We had a couple of sketches we took out the one that were not that great of an idea and we pick a few that we like, after picking the top 3 ideas we started to explore them even more, by making scaled models.
Top 3 Sketches
Final Idea
Scaled Model Design
We made a 1/4 scaled model of our boat, what we did was take a piece of scrap cardboard and scaled 4 by 8 into 1/4 scale. The reason why did a scale model is to see if our ideas would work, or to see how much cardboard we would have left over. Another reason why we made scale models is to test it in water, we put bean bags in them to see how much weight each boat can take. Then using a formula we were able to discover how much weight can our full scale model can hold.