The beauty and excitement of science is that experiments will always deviate from what you have planned and you are almost forced to solve problems in the most efficient and innovative ways. In Action Day 1, Bryan and I were in charge of the “techniques”. We planned to use cystosepiment to find the right shape of our “ship” in order to explore the relationship between the difference in surface tension and speed of the ship. Based on intuition, we agreed that the streamline shape will minimize the friction force of water and ensure the accuracy of our results. That’s the first thing I did today: to design the shape and make ships using foam board. The first shape (Ⅰ) was pretty much like the rain drop, which had a width as 4cm and a length as 6 cm. However, it failed when we did the first trial since the foam board was too heavy and the difference in surface tension cannot actually propel the boat. Though we were disappointed somehow, we immediately came up with a new idea. Bryan and I decided to print out the shape and cover the paper with tape to make it light and water-resistant simultaneously. That was how we came to the shipⅡas shown in the photo. Unfortunately, it didn’t work as well since water flowed into the paper and the ship actually sank. The situation was intense but we didn’t have the choice or the time to feel depressed and give up. We watched a video produced by a MIT lab and decided to use the most achievable water-proof material, the milk box. This time, it was worked well and I was assigned to produce dozens of the shipⅢ in the same size and weight for variable control.
After the successful production of the ship, I was hugely motivated and all things went out smoothly in the afternoon. Though the morning is pretty frustrated when we design the ship, since we have kept failing and at one point we doubt ourselves that whether we would fail the whole Group four project, it’s still the most inspiring part: we didn’t give up and we are urged to do be creative and do better things. For sure we learned a lot and at the moment when the tiny paper ship successfully marched on the water surface, we know we were going to complete the whole experiment. At certain point today, I was a little frustrated, but for the majority of time I was energetic and actively tried all things to solve the problem.
When I was low, my teammates’ spirits inspired me a lot. Jenny didn’t even had the thought of giving up for a second: she had the scientists’ spirit to achieve a thing. When we saw the ship Ⅰ and Ⅱ didn’t work, she just calmly said, “Well, then we seek for another way.” Her calmness did help a lot. We changed the water tank several times today and the whole experimenting process was long and tiring. Lilian and I took and heavy water tank all the way from the washroom to the biology classroom and we encouraged each other mutually. Bryan and I worked together to design different ships and we made a really good sub-team! We four inspired and encouraged each other all day and at the end of today we finished all experiments and got into the data analysis part.
For tomorrow, I am going to learn how to use Logger pro to analyze data since I almost forget how to use it. We may need to do some trials again since some phenomenon are just not accurate or clear enough. I am confident we will achieve more tomorrow, as a team; and I am going to learn more from others and our Group 4 project as well.
FengrouHai 