I would do something creative like the last three blog posts but I'm too tired and I can't come up with anything substantial. The only thing I came up with is an idea where Jonny is laying siege to a castle using trebuchets that fling massive ping pong balls since my JPL machine is a trebuchet. But I have writers block and can't think of how to write that right now. Sorry.
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I can't really connect what I learned about shoelaces to my JPL project. There really isn't any correlation between the two. The only thing I can think of is that my individual research problem confirms that you don't always need a complex invention to solve a problem. Shoelaces are a very simple way to keep shoes tight, and they are used everywhere today. I can use this with my JPL project by making sure to not make my machine too complicated.
It's pretty obvious what is going wrong with my JPL project. My group's initial idea was, to be frank, a failure. Honestly, I think our idea was fine and could've worked, but we'll never find out. The air tank we were going to use with our machine is not certified to be use in the competition, so we had to completely scrap our first design. However, we quickly decided on a new machine to design: a catapult/trebuchet. It's a simple way to easily and accurately transport the ping pong balls. So that's what's going well with the project. We've already found a good plan, and are currently working on our prototype build. Our machine is a pretty simple concept compared to other groups, but as I wrote in the previous paragraph: less is more.
The main problems we'll need to work around are the calculations. While catapults and trebuchets are pretty accurate, we will have a little bit of trouble figuring out the right angle and force to shoot the ping pong balls to always go into the jar. Other problems we may run into are air resistance (although that will probably be very minimal), loading the balls onto the machine, and the Arduinos and servos not working...if we decide to use them.
Something going on in my life is, like every other senior, college apps. I've been working on my college apps a bit, and I've been talking to my coach about swimming in college too. My coach has "set me up" with Harvard. It's kinda complicated but I'll explain it. Basically, although the Harvard swim team is full, the coach is interested in me. So what I'd do is apply to Harvard and he'd do his best to influence my application and get me in. This was something I wrestled with for a while, but after about a week of thinking I came up with a plan on what I'm going to do. I'm going to apply to Harvard, but also apply to the other schools I want to go to academically, like UC Berkeley or Harvey Mudd. f I get in to Harvard I will go and swim there. And I might change my major to law there too, I don't know yet. If I don't get in to Harvard, I'll just go to one of the schools I want to go to academically and not swim on the college team (I would probably swim on a club team in the area though). And my major would be engineering. So that's what has been going on in my life most recently.