Toothpick Bridge

Our (mine and Jason's) bridge held up to 115 batteries, and weighed 11.5 grams. This is a 230:1 ratio.

We began to see our bridge sag at the strain of the batteries, right where the strings were being held:

Our bridge finally collapsed at the spots we expected it to break, right where the strings were being held:

If I were to reconstruct my bridge in an effort to make it better, I would reinforce the spots where the strings were at.

Edit: After reinforcing the areas that held the strings, we got our bridge to hold up to 267 batteries, weighing in at 12.6 grams. Coming in at a 490:1 ratio!

Lego Robotics Challenge

We spent a good amount of time, using our LEGO parts, designing and building cars that could navigate both straight and curved courses.

This was our car for the robotics challenge. The large tires made it easy to traverse over obstacles and crush smaller cars. It also had good traction. It was able to complete the straight line challenge, which was going three feet without turning. We decided to keep the wheels for the next challenge, but all else had to go for us to be able to make the turn.

This was the course:

Simply a straight line

The next challenge's course was this:

You cannot see the whole thing, but that is the finish line. The turn occurs after the black piece of metal you see on the right. The starting point was just past that.

The challenge was to preform a 90 degree right turn, as shown above. We modified our car to be able to make the turn, and it barely made it across, but we crossed the finish line nevertheless. Our final product only consisted of wheels, that dragged the remote control on the ground like a sled.We got the remote control to cross the finish line, so we considered ourselves successful.