Rocket Catch

The competition was to make a lego structure that would catch nerf rockets. The structure would have to withstand four shots at it from a nerf gun or from someone throwing a nerf rocket at it.


Team members
Fatima- parts collector
Kelly
Me- leader


1. We lost because our tower was not strong enough or stable enough to survive a hit from the nerf rocket. Prasad threw the nerf rocket at our tower and it exploded into a million pieces. We did manage to land a nerf rocket into our tower before the attack came. The difference between the offensive side of this competition and previous competitions was that people had the option to throw the nerf rocket or shoot it from the gun. As we learned from previous competitions, the nerf gun does not pack much of a punch so we thought we could afford to make the tower not super strong. I think that the fact that you didn't have to use the nerf gun slipped our minds and that was the biggest mistake we could make. Our tower was designed pretty well to catch rockets and was fairly far off the table but we did not make it strong enough to withstand the force of a someone whipping a nerf rocket at it. We failed to look at all the factors affecting success and to counteract variables with constants.


2. Kelly is extroverted, sensing, thinking, judging. Fatima is introverted, sensing, feeling, perceiving. You would think that having two extroverts and one introvert on a team would be a problem but we managed to work really well together. I was the team leader that kept track of time because I was an extrovert and I just hate being late for things so I felt more comfortable being responsible of the time management. We communicated our ideas well and  gave each other a chance to explain our ideas. When asking for pieces for Fatima to get Kelly and I were clear and concise with what we wanted which was very helpful because it made things run smoothly. Once we had gotten all the materials we needed, each of us worked on separate parts and brought it all together near the end. 


3.  I think our team was best at time management. We worked efficiently and stayed on task and on time throughout the whole competition. We gave ourselves an ample amount of time for each step and actually ended up ahead of schedule. We used that extra time to test our tower, practice throwing the rocket into the tower and making minor adjustments and fixing the damage done during testing. 


4. Next time I think that our team needs to write down all the possible ways our tower could fail. I think that thinking about Anti-winning would ensure that we remember all the things we need to design for. If we had remembered that people can throw nerf rockets really hard at lego towers we would have built our tower stronger, thus making it more successful. Our tower could have been made to withstand a harder hit. We could also improve on our brainstorming part. If we had decided on a design together a little faster we could have gotten better materials. Since we took a little bit longer on that step, the other teams snatched up some of the useful pieces so we had to work with what was left.