Design Journal - Day 1

November 8th, 2018

Day 1 Journal

By: Simon Zhang 

Today is the first day of our group discussion on the toy project. I, Simon, and my partners, Angelica and LJ came up with three toy proposals that involve the concept of a pinball launcher, as Angel suggested it.

Angel made a prototype launcher and so first, everyone was made aware of how the pinball launcher works. The four images showed our brainstorming and the structures of each design. The pinball launcher is made up of a short wooden stick surrounded by a strong spring to provide the force to push the marble which is aimed so that the marble can hit the block. Meanwhile, this stick is installed in the centre of the box and three blocks are placed onto the dowel to provide the support needed to make sure the spring compresses when the dowel is pulled through the hole and the spring returns its original form when the dowel is released.  This design is shown below.

                                         

The first proposal was a soccer pinball machine. The concept of the soccer pinball machine is two players would play the game and there would be two soccer nets on two sides, and the players would play the game of soccer using the pinball launcher to launch the soccer ball. A player would win the soccer pinball machine game if they scored the most points in a set amount of time. The soccer pinball machine is the first drawing in the image down below. The second proposal is a bowling pinball machine. The concept of the bowling pinball machine is two players would also play the game and two sets of bowling pin would be placed on two sides, where the players would try to knock down the other player's bowling pins, and whoever knocks down all bowling pins would win.  The bowling pinball machine is the second drawing in the image down below.

The third proposal is called "delivery", which is where a pinball machine is used to knock down cubes that looked "delivery" boxes. We chose "delivery" because the other two design were too complicated for us to make. Since we chose "delivery", we decided to first think about the dimensions of the base, which can be seen in the image down below. We also made a sketch of what "delivery" will look like.
                                       

 
We also discuss other things like how we would get the ball to the dowel, we decided to use some sort of tunnel and have a wood part that acts a barrier that we could lift up to allow the marble go to the dowel. The sketch of the "delivery" and the tunnel system is shown in the image down below.

We planned to have a tower of cubes in the middle and have two players to compete with each other, where the one who has less cubes on their side wins and gets a prize for winning. The time limit for the game would be 1 minute.

The physic concepts of our toy will on the basis that the spring will provide a spring force and so will cause the ball to be in motion, so momentum. Since there will be a base for the ball to roll on, there will also be friction and since the ball has mass, there will also be the physics concept of rest energy, which states the rest energy is equal to the rest mass, as the ball is not at motion at first. Furthermore, since the ball causes the block to move a distance, work is another physic concept that is involved in our toy. Work is when a force is able to move an object from its original position.

                                 

By the end of the library meeting, we realized the model of the pinball launcher for our toy that Angel made needed to be fixed because when the pinball launcher was pulled back and released, the spring moved, which would affect physic concept calculations like the k constant of the spring. This problem can be seen in the video down below.

The walls, the bottom, and the cubes are made from scrap wood that Angel's dad had after doing the kitchen cabinets. The wooden dowel is from Home Hardware and cost $1.99. The compression spring was bought from Canadian Tire and cost $1.69. The compression spring measures 69.9 mm x 14.3 mm.