MARISA DIZONNO
ENGINEERING
PLTW PRINCIPLES OF ENGINEERING (POE)
This course is designed to give students a feel of many fields of engineering. Througbout the course, we have done projects and lessons that had to do with civl engineering, mechanical engineering, physics, electrical engineering, compter science, and many more. It gives broad overviews of what each field does and then gave me a chance to try it out. This course is a glorified version of an introductory to engineering class. We cover topics from thermodynamics to ballistic designto coding. It helps students to figure out which engineering career path they want to follow. This class is very hands on based along with many powerpoints and notes to go along with it. Throughout this portfolio, you will find projects of min that I have completed throughout these courses.
RUBE GOLDBERG
Rube Goldberg is a type of design where one uses multiple simple machines to do an everyday task. Our class made one big Rube Goldberg machine with the task of pushing a pizza into a pizza oven. Our teacher divided the class into 5 smaller groups. Each group had a certain spot in the final lineup and had to use at least 3 different simple machines in their building. Our group used a combination of in clined planes, pulleys, and levers to complete our part. The project taught us to communicate with other groups because we had to find a way to connect our parts and then to sketch and experiment because sometimes your ideas don't always work out.
CAREER PRESENTATION: BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING
My teacher is really big on helping us choose the right career path in the engineering field. We had earlier done a professional interview on a current engineer and what their job/life is like. Then, we were given a field of engineering that we were interested in to research and create a powerpoint about. My field of engineering was Biomedical Engineering. We then presented to the class about our fields. I enjoyed learning about all the different types of engineering. It really sparked new interests that I didn't have before.you.
WINCH DESIGN
A winch is a machine using cicuits to lift weight. Our teacher made a very basic winch design. The project was to modify her original design to get our winch design to lift more weight than our teachers did. The weight had to be lifted at least 6 inches off the surface though. The only equipment we had was one 2-wire motor, one 9V battery, provided cables, and VEX equipment. My groups design was a very long inclined plane. We figured that the lower the slope of the inclined plane, the easier it would be to move up it. We also had the weight be dragged up the inclined plane rather than just lifting it up. Our final design was able to lift up 12.5 lbs. you.
MARBLE SORTER
At this point in the class, we had been learning a lot about mechanisms, physical properties, and coding. Creating a marble sorter was the perfect way to combine all of these skills. The marble sorter is a mock recyle sorter for a recycling company and the marbles are the different recycled objects that the machine would seperate. The objective of this project was to create a marble sorter that could sort 3 groups of 5 marbles into seperate containers in the fastest amount of time possible. The marbles varied in either size, color, weight, or multiple of these characteristis. The machine had to be fully automated with no human interaction and we had a budget. Each group could spend no more than $50,000. Having a budget was a nice touch to the project because it gave it a realistic feel and a taste of what working on a job would be like. Our machine began with pouring the marbles into a channel on a slight down hill angle. The marbles were stopped by a rubber gear that was timed to turn every couple seconds. We cut a few of the teeth out on the gear so that the marble would get caught underneath and then come out on the other side. The marble was then stopped by a plus that was attachted to a gear. Since we had 3 different colored marbles, we put a light sensor under the marble when it was stopped at the plus.
PING PONG BALL LAUNCHER
During the kinematics unit, I learned a lot about projectile launchers. Components such as velocity, speed, distance, and time were the main focus of building these machines. The object was to create some sort of ballistic design that could launch a ping pong ball as far and as accurate as possible. Our design was modeled after a baseball or softball pitching machine. It started off with the ping pong ball on a track. The track would guide it to 2 hanging wheels that were spinning. The wheels were attachted to a simple gear train that gave it a high mechanical advantage. The gears were then hooked up to a small VEX motor. While the wheels were spinning, the ball would get caught in the middle and come flying out the other end. Due to lack of time, we were not able to make the launch pad adjustable to try it from sifferent angles so we had to use scrap wood from the wood shop to angle it. Overall, our machine worked but not as well as planned. Looking back, we should have made the gear train and wheels more stable because they kept coming loose a lot. We also should have made it a lot smaller and compact rather than big and spread out, I feel like that would have given it more support as well.
The light sensor gave a value to a motor that was controlled to move a conveyor belt right at the end of the channel. The conveyor belt would move to the certain position that it was set to based off the value given from the light sensor. After a few seconds, the gear was attached to a motor that would turn it so the plus came up and the marble fell into the correct cup. However, our motor for the conveyor belt and light sensor didn't function as planned so the marbles all ended up falling into the same cup.