On academic matters...

Our tensegrity labs for yesterday morning and yesterday afternoon (and tomorrow morning, too, I think) involved learning about force and stiffness. In lecture, Daniel and Dr. Oliveira taught us about Hooke's Law (Force=ks where k is the stiffness constant of the material and s is the amount of displacement under the force).

During the first test of the lab, we clamped strings of different materials to a square rod using a C-clamp and then added weight to the other end (bags of marbles). We used a yardstick to measure the resting length (before the weight was added) and the stretched length (after the weight was added).

In the second test of the lab, we clamped increasingly large amounts of marbles (10, 20, 30, etc.) to a tensegritoy string and measured resting and stretched length in each case. For both tests, we used these data to calculate change in length and then converted that to an amount in meters. Next, we converted the weight of the marbles to kilograms and found the force (mass x gravity). Last, we divided the force by the displacement to find the stiffness constants for the various materials. After we had done all of these calculations by hand, Daniel taught us how to do it in Excel. In today's afternoon Science Communication class, in fact, we did the same thing on our own. We created a chart for all of our measurements in the second test and used Excel to do the calculations. Afterward, we created a scatter plot of the data and then found a line of best fit. The slope of the line was the stiffness constant.

Well, that basically sums up yesterday's classes and today's afternoon class. I haven't been exposed to much of this type of subject before, but it was a pretty interesting topic.

We're going to go over the structure of our final project now... the end of COSMOS is almost here... =(

~CS

So many fun recreational activities now! Gotcha is, of course, fun. Yesterday's safety was to hold two people's hands, so during the 8-10 activity time Sidra and I had to hold Michelle's hands almost the whole time. During one of the few times we let go, her killer almost got her except for Sidra's watchfulness. After that, his friends kept making some feeble attempts to get us to let go, like "Did you drop your phone?" and "Could you help me get these rubberbands off my hand?". It was pretty funny. During floor time, we spent some time making logos and headgear for Michelle and Shannon (the only two survivors in our suite), since today's safety is to dress as a superhero. It's fun seeing everyone's costumes.

Last night Sidra, Michelle, and I went to tie dye, which of course is almost impossible if you can only use one hand or no hands in Michelle's case. Cristina and Ami had to help us with a lot of it, and we took turns holding Michelle's hands. I wonder how our tie dye shirts turned out. We're supposed to get them today. I hope so!

Tonight's activities should be fun too. There's a haunted campus tour, which I can't go on because I didn't know there was a sign-up sheet. =( Oh well. There's also a dive-in movie (Surf's Up), a Twister tournament, and fondue making. I think I'll do Twister and fondue. There are too many fun activities to choose from, and I want to do all of them...

We have our presentation for the fantasy invention in half an hour. It'll be fun seeing everyone else's ideas. I'm sure they all came up with good ones.

I'd better get ready for the presentation. Good day!

~CS