Doghouse project
The purpose of the doghouse project was to learn about physics and or environmentally friendly building. We used what we learned about these topics to build a doghouse. Through a few weeks of building and planning, each group was to successfully complete the building of one of these and give it to an animal rescue. Another side of this project was about puppies. Every year, puppies are forced to birth babies at puppy mills when their are thousands of dogs die of euthanization every year. Our goal was to let the public know about these puppy mills so we can get the banned. You see, it is extremely likely that if you buy a dog from a pet shop, that you are getting a puppy born at a puppy mill.
The planning
In order to plan to build the doghouse, we made many drafts of blueprints as well as prototypes. First off, we all made individual blueprints, than ww got together in groups. With our group, we compiled all the good things about the drafts and made a single one. This was called our group blueprint. After completing the group blueprint, we made a prototype with our group. The prototype was to scale of our actual design and would help us understand how to construct it. We also wrote about how our design was either environmentally friendly, or how it displayed a physics topic:
Dog House Environmental Explanation
Our group incorporated eco friendly designs into our doghouse. For the eco friendly design, we used bamboo and palm fronds to make it minimum waste. Bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants on the earth due to its unique rhizome dependent system. Rhizomes allow a plant to grow perpendicular to the ground. Some species of bamboo can grow up to 98 inches in a day, that's over 9 feet! Also, we already have the bamboo at our school so I am not emitting any fossil fuels by driving to pick up it up from home. The palm fronds are very easy to get and are also very eco friendly because we do not have to waste any fossil fuels to go and get the palm fronds from another place, they are just going with me to school. Bamboo is very good for building because of it’s high strength to weight ratio. It is very water resistant as well that means that we do not have to stain the wood to be able to keep it outside. It’s low weight will make it super easy to transport to our client. Also, this bamboo was cut down in a local area. Instead of shipping it from Asia(where bamboo is extremely prosperous) we just had to haul it up the coast. Also instead of using electric machinery to cut down and produce it, we used basic hacksaws. Palm fronds grow off the coconut palm fronds. These coconut palms can grow up to 30ft tall and the fronds can grow to 60-90cm long.
Dog House Environmental Explanation
Our group incorporated eco friendly designs into our doghouse. For the eco friendly design, we used bamboo and palm fronds to make it minimum waste. Bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants on the earth due to its unique rhizome dependent system. Rhizomes allow a plant to grow perpendicular to the ground. Some species of bamboo can grow up to 98 inches in a day, that's over 9 feet! Also, we already have the bamboo at our school so I am not emitting any fossil fuels by driving to pick up it up from home. The palm fronds are very easy to get and are also very eco friendly because we do not have to waste any fossil fuels to go and get the palm fronds from another place, they are just going with me to school. Bamboo is very good for building because of it’s high strength to weight ratio. It is very water resistant as well that means that we do not have to stain the wood to be able to keep it outside. It’s low weight will make it super easy to transport to our client. Also, this bamboo was cut down in a local area. Instead of shipping it from Asia(where bamboo is extremely prosperous) we just had to haul it up the coast. Also instead of using electric machinery to cut down and produce it, we used basic hacksaws. Palm fronds grow off the coconut palm fronds. These coconut palms can grow up to 30ft tall and the fronds can grow to 60-90cm long.
The building
When building, we were given about two weeks to successfully complete building a doghouse. We were given a plethora of tools as well as whatever supplies we could find in our schools shed. Our team ran into the problem of not having enough bamboo to complete our doghouse. What we had to do to fix with is to cut each bamboo piece in half. This way we had twice as much bamboo. How we built our doghouse was like a tiki hut. We put palm fronds on the top like a roof, and had bamboo walls with a door. There are 1x2's connecting all the bamboo together on each side. Also, we made it so our house slants so that any rain water would run off the top and not just sit and collect.
Triptychs
Also in this project, we made triptychs. These triptychs represented our physics concept or how environmentally friendly yours was. For example, since mine was about the environmental upside of building with bamboo, I displayed my facts about bamboo on these triptychs. The top one is my first draft and the bottom one is my second draft. I made the bamboo more realistic in the second, as well and making the clouds better