Carlie Thibeault's Reflection

The balloon car brought many challenges and rewards, but first we had to go threw the hard stuff to get to the easy stuff. Me, Tia and Darrien had to make at least 2 cars until we got the car that actually worked. So obviously that brought many challenges, for example: the day me and Darrien met up at my house, we had to build the whole car and the most challenging part about that was trying to figure out how to make the wheels stay on straight. What we did is we tryed using erasers in between the CD whole to stick our scewer in, which is where the wheel would go on, but when we finally tested it, and it would turn to one side then they would wobble to the other, that made the car unstable which would effect our trial run at school, so we started all over. Another time when me, Tia and Darrien met up at my house is the day that we almost got our car to work. We tryed using corks for the scewers to go in this time. It actually worked! When we tryed testing it at my house though, the balloon got in the way of the tires so the next day at school we had to think of a plan to make the balloon so it doesn't hit the back tires. The last obsticle was the blogs, the blogs weren't terribly difficult but they caused some challenges. The most challenging part about those is was trying to think of all the stuff we learned in science and try to relate it to the balloon car project. In the end we got an amazing reward; a A+ for going 22 meters!
The most valuble part of this learning experience was learning about all of Newtons Laws and seeing how they actually came in play with the balloon car. When we were learning in class about the three laws, i didn't really uderstand it but when we made the car it actually helped me understand it better, for example: the first law, an object at rest will stay at rest until acted on by a force and an object in motion will stay in motion until acted on by an unbalanced force, when the car moved I noticed that the air inside the balloon was hitting against the air on the outside, so i related that to Newtons first law of motion. Also i lvoed working with Darrien and Tia. We worked really good together and we got along real well. Overall the project was really fun and I learned so much new stuff. We all got a great reward and a very valuble learning experience.