The October sky project was based off of a movie, about building rockets. The rockets we were building were either paper or a bottle rocket. At the start of this project we watched and reflected on the movie. Then built small little paper rockets that we blew out of a straw. We went through a trial and error and ended up making better rockets then the first. We did this again having the choice to make a paper or bottled rocket. We did have partners this time not having any specific role but you picked you partner by looking at work (without a name) that could be anybody's, then writing them down; you would have three partners this time. Everyone decided to build a bottled rocket, while we decided to build an air rocket. Now Mannix decide that we would design it off of a missile. Now unfortunately our rocket didn't launch that day but the project was still really fun. Now the third round. This time the was roles for each of the three people. Project Manager: Kept the group in check and wrote a write up as well as helping with the rocket. Rocket Designer: You would have to make a scale drawing of the rocket, find the altitude after the launch and spend a lot of the time building the rocket. Budget Director: Your group starts with 1.5 million dollars to build and the budget manager maneges the money. Now I was the budget director in this, and the thing that I decided to do as an extra was sell materials. Yeah sold stuff which meant doing a whole ton of extra work. But we were one of the groups who saved the most amount of money.
To reflect on this whole project I came in this not knowing anything about rockets, although last year at HTM we did a newtons law project and our product won 2nd place. The only problem with me is that when I'm doing a "hands on" project with group member I usually felt like I was a tool. This time I did something a bit more independent so that ended up working extremely well in the project and really bumped up my team's score. It was a really fun high school project!