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Let's start with kinetic and potential energy and how it affects the object in the trebuchet. Kinetic energy is the amount of energy that an object has when it's in motion, while potential energy is the amount of energy an object has while it's at rest. KE (Kinetic Energy) = 1/2M x V² (Mass) (Velocity). PE (Potential Energy) 
= Mass x Gravity x Height. When we were working on the
logistics of our trebuchet we had to figure out what our projectile's velocity was going to be. Velocity is how fast something moves in a direction, so if you threw a ball at a speed of 49 miles per hour then the velocity of that ball would be 49 mph because the ball is going in one direction and it is being thrown at 49 mph. We needed to know what our velocity would be with the object we threw in order to throw that object as far as possible. Another concept that we learned about was acceleration. Acceleration is the rate of change in the speed of the object. For instance, if that ball had a motor on it and you threw it at 49 mph and then that motor kicked in and the ball was then going at a speed of 50 mph that would be its acceleration. The last thing that we talked about was projectile motion. This is the action of an object falling under the sole force of gravity. This means that if you dropped an object off of a cliff, that would be projectile motion because the object would keep falling due to gravity after you let go of it.

In order to have our trebuchet launch its projectile as far as possible, we had to take all of this information into consideration when constructing it. When our class did research we found that the optimal angle to have the projectile released at was 45 degrees. To make sure that this was possible we had to see how heavy we needed to have our counterweight so that our sling/boul would release at the right angle. We also had to look at our how heavy our counterweight was so that we could have enough velocity and acceleration for our projectiles. If the weight wasn’t heavy enough, then the projectile wouldn’t release right and vice versa. When it came to kinetic and potential energy, we used the equations to find out what our projectiles KE and PE was.

During this project we had to think about some of our 21st-century skills and what it means to be in a community of learners. To me, this is making sure that you are respecting everyone in your class, for instance, encouraging them in what they are doing and just saying things like “you got this, your project looks awesome!” Another one of the skills was collaboration. Collaboration is when everyone in the group is doing something. To me, this was really put into play when we started constructing our trebuchets. This was because we all had to work together if we actually wanted to get anything done. Collaboration is something that I believe is a hard thing to accomplish because most of the time you're going to have people in your group that just don’t do anything or you don’t work well with them. Collaboration is something that I believe is essential for a group to succeed. I hope that in the next group project there will be more collaboration throughout my group than there was, I’d like to learn how to accomplish this in future projects.

Another 21st-century skill that I think is also quite important is communication. Communication is something that a group will fall apart without, this is because if there is a person in your group that wasn’t “in on the plan” then that can lead to problems later in the project. Communication is something that everyone has to work on, people often won’t tell their group members what they are going to do before they do it. This has been pretty common in most the groups that I have had. This project, in particular, was one that requires a lot of critical thinking. This was because if your trebuchet didn’t work quite right then you and your group had to problem solve until it did work. The last skill was creativity. I think that this went more into the cultural aspect of our trebuchets. This was because after we constructed the trebuchet we then had to show what era the trebuchet was from. I know that my group didn't do as good of a job with this as I wanted. Being creative with projects is one of my favorite things because you basically make it your own when you put that extra touch onto it.  

For me, this was one of the most challenging groups that I have ever been in. This was because we had many arguments over various things like what size the swingarm should be, how wide our base needs to be and how we were going to decorate it to show our culture that our trebuchet was from. At the beginning of the project all of us were working pretty well together. We were agreeing on what our prototype should look like and how we were gonna go about creating it. The disagreeing started when only two out of the four of us were really doing substantial work. One of my other classmates and I tried to get the other people to do some of the building for our base and they did work on it for a bit, but after a while they just stopped. When we were about to cut our wood for our swing arm one of the other people in my group cut and started drilling before she told us. So I was a bit annoyed with that because I would have liked to know what she was doing before she cut our wood. When I asked her why she did that and that we were gonna make it bigger than that, she got quite annoyed at me and there was some tension in our group for most of the duration of the project. There was also some discussion of how wide our base was going to be. Half of my group said that it should be thinner and the other half said to keep it the way it was. In the end, we left it. I would have liked to change it and make it about half of what it was. In the end, I would have liked to make several changes to our trebuchet because I know that it could have launched a lot further than 33 ft.

In group projects, every person has certain strengths and weaknesses. One of my strengths is making sure that everyone is included in the group. I also feel like I’m more of a leader than a follower. Making sure that everyone was contributing to my group proved to be rather difficult, though, because not all of us were doing things to help at all times. This was something that was frustrating to me because I believe that everyone needs to contribute or it’s just not a group. Being a leader was also more difficult than it normally is for me because not everyone in my group would listen to me or they would say “Okay that sounds good” and then they would do something completely different without telling the rest of us. When a group member does something without telling the rest of the group I don’t think that is being a good group member because we are supposed to all be working together and not separately. For our first group project in physics I don’t think that it was horrible even though I would have liked it to be a bit smoother in our communication. That's not always going to work. Every group is going to be different and that’s just how things are going to work sometimes.