Building cardboard boats!?! Part One

My school offers a course called "Pre-Engineering" as an elective in 9th. So, I signed up to take it. This class is only offered at the high school building, so I have to walk to the high school every other day for that class. After wandering around searching for it for a very long time, I found it. Guess where it was... "The CTE Dungeon", basically the basement at the high school. When I get into the classroom I realized that there are only THREE other girls. I knew that there wouldn't be that many girls taking the class, but I assumed there would be more than 4 of us.

On the first day of school our teacher assigned us groups, gave us a chunk of clay and told us to make a boat. My group consisted of a boy in my grade, myself and a boy in the grade above us. As we were building the boat the kid in the grade above me asked who I had for geography. I responded with my teacher and he said "Oh he is so hard, he always caught me cheating on his tests. That's going to be the hardest part about his class". I was so baffled by what he said that I just laughed and said "That sounds like a you problem, not a me problem".  I'm not sure what motivated me to say that, but let's just say he doesn't talk to me anymore. Once we finished building the clay boats, we put them in a bucket full of water and tested how many pennies our boat could hold. Our boat held about 30 pennies.

The next day in class our teacher informed us we were going to be building cardboard boats. At first I thought she meant little cardboard boats to hold pennies again. Then, she started talking about racing them and how it had to hold two people. Let's just say I was very confused. She then clarified that we had to build boats out of cardboard to hold you and a partner. The next day we got assigned partners and started working. My partner for this project is Megan.

Calculations for finding the waterline (Page 1 of 4)

Before we could begin making the actual boats we had to make prototypes that were to scale. Once we made the prototype, we had to calculate the "waterline" of the boat or in other words how far the boat would sink down. After, the most confusing lesson ever (I'm serious... I don't think I've ever been more confused in my life) on how to find the waterline, we had to go home and figure out all the calculations. After, four and a half hours of stress and confusion I figured it out (possibly... we'll see how accurate it is). According to my calculations our actual boat is supposed to sink down 3.5 inches.

After two weeks, two rolls of duct tape, a bottle of glue and a whole lot of cardboard, we finished our boat! We are still not entirely convinced it will float, but we'll see how it goes. Our boat race is this Thursday, I'll let you know what happens in part 2. Oh and did I mention my teacher invited all of the Ecker Hill students and faculty to come and watch the race. That will be interesting... Oh and the Park Record (our local newspaper).

Our "Lovely" Cardboard Boat

Au revoir  - Claire