The Learning Experience

       I have finally finished my catapult project and believe it or not, I learned quite a bit! My first model was made completely of wood, with a long arm and a stop. It looked similar (but not the same) to this one.

 It was a complete failure. The ping pong ball went 10 feet.    

Then, I put on a plastic spoon.

          12 ft. Failure for me. I continued to play with the stop and length of the arm, when it occurred to me. Maybe I should try a shorter arm. From there, I took the remainder of the wooden dowel from cutting it, and stuck half of a ping-pong ball onto it to form a bowl. I then attached it to the catapult.

It went about 17 ft. at the most. It seemed like it was too heavy and that the arm did not have enough momentum. So, I took off the dowel/arm thing and put on a smaller and shorter spoon. This one had a plastic scoop that had a bowl shape. 

          The only problem: it shot the ball down, so that it did not have much of an arch. I took that off and decided to go with a regular soup spoon. This was my final design.

         My ping pong ball has an average flight of about 23 ft. and it is working really well. It seems to have the perfect ratio of arch to distance. 

Overall, I learned a few basic points:

-shorter arm= more distance, less arch

-add a tail to keep the back of mousetrap from messing up trajectory

-stop do not always work

-fancier is not necessarily better!

I had a lot of fun with this project!