Reflection/Conclusion- Balloon Car Project- Matt Fothergill and Joe DeMaio

At the beginning of our project, we were very stumped on which to make our wheels. Our first prototype included having two Gatorade caps taped to each other making which turned out to be a bad idea. Another idea that did not work well would be our actual base. We started with a heavy type of base and eventually changed to the top of Matt's shoe-box which turned out successful. Another problem with our balloon car would be our first straw which was a Dunkin' Donuts straw which was too wide. The air came out too fast and our car couldn't get a good enough push to start its trip. One thing that went extremely well would be our choice to make our wheels CD's. These worked well because they were thin, had much less friction than the caps, and if kept straight moved very fast. Another great choice was our axle design. We had our wooden stick hot glued to our wheels and a straw acting as a sleeve on the outside of the wooden stick which was glued strategically to the base. This made the axles spin with the wheels and not affect the base. Another good idea was the way we fixed our balloon before the second trial. We built a sort of support to raise our balloon higher, making the air escape at a higher altitude which ultimately extended our car's distance 6 meters from the previous day. We thought about using these essential technique by studying long and hard and try many and many ideas, CD's worked the best as wheels because they had the least amount of friction and had many revolutions which gave us more distance. The MVP (Most Valuable Part) on our balloon car was by far our CD wheels. They gave us much more distance than we expected and was all we could ask for. We enjoyed this project and were happy with our final distance.