Trebuchet Project Part 1

After a semester of promising that we would study parametric equations by launching items across the field at school, we have finally started out trebuchet project.  After a few hours of discussion and watching some awesome YouTube videos in class, we compiled all of our ideas and hashed out which combinations of ideas would be the most effective for the materials and methods we were going to employ.  

This is the basic idea we have reached:

We decided that we were going to use some of the trees near campus to make the poles and created a "shopping list" of lengths that we would need.  I thought it might be a more fun approach to use some of the old-school methods of building - lashing and other rope-work to make this project a bit more complex and allow them to learn a completely new skill.  

So far it has been a roaring success.  Kids are very excited to spend an hour or so a week working at our "workshop" which is located up near the field above campus, cleaning the fallen trees of their branches, learning to tie better knots and how to lash spars of wood together to create a medieval siege weapon.  

While we will not be building a siege engine that is capable of launching a projectile into a castle, we sure will hope to clear 100 yards with a tennis ball sized item.

Hopefully the next week of construction goes well. 

For those of you who do not know what a trebuchet is, check out the following YouTube video:

Day Two Post Located Here