Project Paper Delivery

It’s a classic problem: try a shoot a piece of paper far with only simple materials. Compete. Declare a winner.

But the hardest part is often the one that’s overlooked. The twist in this case still seemed to be a pretty simple one: follow the engineering method. By this point in the year, we can safely assume everyone knows what that means. You have to test your designs and use quantitative measures to evaluate them. Of course, the seeming simplicity of the project got us in the end. Analysis? What analysis? … Oh, analysis means math? Yeah, we learned that one the hard way.

This was also the first project that required a significant written section. Consequently, we had no idea what would be expected of us. The report was text-heavy. It didn’t have a table of contents. It didn’t have page numbers. That all changed before the next report.  Also, as the editor/compiler of the paper, I had my first encounter with people who may not have the same standard of writing as I do. Commas do not proceed every “and” in a sentence (though I am partial to the last comma in a list that they (I don’t really know who “they” is but someone important) say is not needed now).

Our solution – using a rubber-band powered crossbow with the piece of paper rolled up as a sushi – was relatively simple. This simplicity allowed our group to win the distance competition. Our report was too simple. This simplicity allowed our group to not be as excited about our grade. At the end of the day, it was a classic learning method: learn from your mistakes. We definitely made lots of mistakes and we definitely learned from them what the engineering method of documentation really is.