Turbo Jets
Event Location: Cocoa-FL
Competition: Junior Solar Sprint
Division: 4-6 (JSS Green)
School: Zellwood Elementary
Team Size: 3
Zellwood Elementary
Kevin V. 5th grade
Nathanael C. 5th grade
Luke D. 4th grade
Journal Entries
| Date | Journal Entry | |
| 9-13-2022 | We began on working on our solar car base . we marked the location were different part of the car would be located. We are working on the car and Kevin is working on the support for the solar panel. Kevin, Nathanael and Luke are working on ideas, our teacher is helping us build and giving us ideas. We also glued parts to the car. We are staring on the front wheels with Luke. | |
| 11-9-2022 | Nathanael made some jet stickers to add some details to the car, on the front sides of the car we added the team logo (turbo jets). We also painted it to give it some character. | |
| 11-15-2022 | Also we added the solar panel on top of the car ,this will help the car to move with the energy of the sun. It also has back up supply of energy with the batteries for a cloudy day. Once we put the solar panel on the car we tested it . | |
| 11-31-2022 | We tested the car but there was a problem the string was rubbing the wood so we put tape on the bottom of the car. | |
| 12-12-2022 | We took off the expo marker, the muffler and started to remake our car after the competition. | |
| 1-17-2023 | The gator clip broke so we had to replace it. The engine fell off when we were testing so we rebuilt it. We were testing our car with the sun and it work. We tested our solar car the 1st try was 4 seconds and 22 milliseconds . | |
| 2-21-2023 | We tested our car and the times were: 6:43, 3:61, 4:53 seconds | |
| 3-21-2023 | We modified the car so the solar panel can lean towards the sun with a Lego Bionicle to move it in direction of the sun to go faster and we got bigger tires so that are gear did not make friction with the ground . | |
| 3-28-2023 | We tested our car and the times were: 3:45, 3:69, 2:50, 2:64, 2:70, 1:64, 2:13, 1:81, 1:69, 1:59, 1:50 seconds. It goes much faster than our first design. | |
| 4-4-2023 | Nathanael painted the car, to make it more presentable and added some decals with our team name and logo. Then we tested the car many time but the fastest was 1.50 sec. | |
| 4-11-2023 | We downloaded the new pictures of the car then we tested it to make sure it works. |
Car Design
Here are our ideas before the construction of our first car. We took these ideas from our first car and did adjustments to get our new one. The first one is Kevin’s the second one is Nathanael and the third one is Luke’s we put all of our ideas together and came up with this new car. Also we have added a list of all the materials we would need.
Old car design
OCPS Super STEM Saturday Competition
New Design
This is the new design we came up with to achieve faster speed with a mix of all our ideas.
This is a side view of our new car.
This is the back of the car, where its gear is.
This is the bottom of the car where we added the bigger tires so our gear did not scrape the ground.
Inside of the car we added some straws to support the solar panel, some turbo decals for looks. Also if you look closely you can see a part of the Lego Bionicle (which has a ball joint to connect to the Bionicle arm that connect to the solar panel) in between of the passenger seat and the turbo decal.
This is the left side and front of the car. In the front of the car you can see the teams name, also you can see the support straws for the solar panel, and if you look closely you can see the Bionicle arm extend down from the solar panel, this helps it to stay up and be able to move around to the direction of the sun (which has a socket where the ball joint connects) as seen in the previous picture. this allows it to move where we think the sun light is beaming the best.
Car Specifications
Finished Car Specifications:
CAR SIZE: 25cm length 14cm width 12cm height
CAR WEIGHT: 272 grams
GEAR RATIO: H 40 tooth 2M
List of components:
Solar panel, engine, wood, wheels, clips, wires – we got this from our teacher from parts she got from a training
Bionicle legos and wheel legos from the teachers son
Paper clip for the line guide – from our teacher
Straws from the Science Lab
Cup cut in half from the Science Lab