John Carmichael Mrs. V, Miss Johnson, Ms.

Brown December 6, 2013 Mousetrap Car- Knowledge and Thinking For one of my artifacts I chose my mousetrap car I had to build in my Principles of Engineering class. The goal was to build a car that traveled exactly 12 feet, and that was only powered by a single mousetrap. There were many different ways to get the distance right; I chose the math-based route. I took the diameter of my cars axle, and then found the circumference. After I had found the circumference I divided the total distance by the circumference to find the number of rotations needed (in theory) to reach the 12 foot mark. After I completed all the calculations, I conducted multiple experiments. Throughout the testing phase of the project I encountered many problems that prevented my car from working. One problem was that the string kept sliding on the axle, which caused the car to not move at all. Another problem was that the wheels didnt have enough traction, but that problem was solved when we ran the car in the hallway. The biggest problem I encountered was that the mousetrap didnt have enough power to move the full car of the weight. So I had to lengthen the string so the mousetrap wasnt fully held back, this allowed the car to start on its own without having to be pushed. After constant readjusting and testing I finally got it to consistently hit the 12 foot mark. On the day of testing at school we were given three attempts to run our cars, and Mr. Sturm didnt count the worst of the three runs. My car won with the lowest average, he found the average by taking the amount of distance our car was off from the mark and then dividing it by

two. Since my car had the lowest average I received three extra credit points, which gave me an overall grade of 103/100. I chose my mousetrap car to represent knowledge and thinking because there were many problems I had to overcome to complete it. After every failed test of my mousetrap car I made changes and modifications until my car almost couldnt get any better. Troubleshooting and problem solving is very important in the career field I want to get into, and Mr. Sturm does a fantastic job of challenging all of his students and bringing out the best in them.

Story- Written Communication For written communication I decided to use the book that my group and I wrote for American Studies. Our book was supposed to be written in the style of 19th century realism authors. In order to prepare ourselves for this our class read several different selections from realism authors of the 1800s. Some of these selections were from Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. They all showed different sides of American Realism. My favorite one of these was the one written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The short story was called The Yellow Wallpaper. It was during the time that women were still treated poorly and had hardly any rights. The woman in the story was supposedly suffering of some sort of mental illness. She was really funny and she talked about her obsession with the yellow wallpaper. In the story I wrote the main

characters name was James. His life was drastically changed by the Embargo Act, but he still made the best out of it. Personally Ive never been a great writer, all of my life I would rather have built something or solved a problem rather than write about it or reflect on it. Ive always liked being graded on things that had a definite answer or solution, rather than being graded on someones opinion of my work. So when we were given this assignment I was discouraged because I always thought I wasnt a good writer. I was surprised after I received the grade on the story I wrote because I had gotten a better grade than I had expected.