Recommendations

The treuchet challenge was my favorite out of all the other challenges we did through out this semester.  It was the most interesting to built and even more to shoot your finished design.  Pretty much everything went well for our team while building the trebuchet, we had troubles finding the right release point and having the right pouch.  We also had some problems with weight because we did break our weight holders right off on our first tries.  But other than that we had no problems.
Some things to do different in the future could be to use golf balls instead of the tennis balls because the golf balls are designed for maximum range and tennis balls really aren't.

Post-competition Reflection

For the accuracy part of the competition our trebuchet did very well.  We had our best runs in the competition than we did in practice.  All of our throws were all in about the same range from the hoop so we were all impressed. 
To improve our trebuchet I think the only thing we would do is improve the pouch, we had troubles with it through out the whole competition, everything else that we had built held up well and worked as we had planned. I don't really think that we could've made any more changes, other that the pouch to make it more effective because overall we had pretty good trebuchet to begin with.  Some things that we could've tweaked to improve performance would be to find the perfect angle of release for our trebuchet.  Another would be have the right weight distribution that would make ours most effective. Other than those I don't think we could've changed anything else.

Post 4

For the time we had to built or trebuchet and the problems that had happened (weight holders and the pouch) both breaking we could've added a lot more distance to our shots.  But overall it went well, we are happy with the results.  The only changes that we will do to our trebuchet is to reduce the weight and change the angle of release to reduce distance by about 10m.

Post 3

Our trebuchet's Theoretical Range is 408.25m, and our actual average distance was 23.74.  Some reasons why I believe our actual distance didn't live up to it's potential is 1) because of wind resistance, the formula doesn't take it into account.  2)  We had problems with the pouch, we could not perfect the release time of it. 3)  We also couldn't have the 45 degree angle to have maximum range because we were only using house hold items, which does effect the distance.  4)  Friction is also a reason, when our trebuchet shoots there is a lot of friction involved that over more time could be reduced a great deal to add more distance.  5)  Our last reason is that we shot a tennis ball which is not designed for maximum distances like we were going for, so with more time for better preparation we  could've added a lot more distance. Pictures and videos will be uploaded at a later date.

Test Day

Before the day of the competition the biggest problem that we had on our trebuchet was the pouch.  We could never get the pouch to release the ball at the right time, it would always hold it in to long or release it to early.  But on test day we had built a new pouch that would release the ball at the right time to get out maximum distance.  Test day turned out well for us as we shot it farther than we ever did in practice. We recorded distances of 1) 22.1 2) 24.4 3) 24.5 4) 24.1 5) 23.6.  So our average distance on test day was 23.74.

Trebuchet

For the circular motion unit in physics our challenge project was to build a trebuchet.  Before we could build our full scale model we had to build a cardboard one to prove we understood the physics of it, like the angle of it's trajectory and the counter-weights.  Some factors that we had to think about for the projectile is gravity and the wind.