Kayla Shepard

During this class of Science and Innovation we created a Lego robot car built up of various pieces including different wheels, a motor, and a plug that attached to the computer. With the computer we were able to raise and lower the speed or “power level”. The purpose of the project was to compare our predictions of the cars distance and the distance the computer predicted based on the power level.

In order to compare the two calculations we first needed to measure the wheel circumference of the car, our measurement was 0.17 cm.  We did three experiments with three different power levels.

• The first power level was 75, our measured distance was about 0.26 m/s, the number of wheel turn was 1.55 and the calculated distance from the computer was about 0.27 m/s.
• The second power level was 100, our measured distance was about 0.35 m/s, the number of the wheel turn was 2.24 and the computers calculation was about 0.39 m/s.
• Lastly, our power level was 50, our measured distance was about 0.17 m/s, the number of the wheel turn was .97 and the computers calculated distance was about 0.17 m/s.

After finding all of this information we calculated the Error percent of each trial. To find that we took our measured distance, subtracted that by the computers measured distance, divided that answer by our measured distance and then finally multiplied that by 100.

Our Measured Dist. –  Comp. Measured Dist.

_______________________________________    X   100%

Our Measured Dist.

By doing so we found out that the percent error was 5.09% for the first trial, 4.7% for the second and finally 0.6% for the third trial.

This project was not necessarily hard, yet it had a lot of parts to it making it tedious work. It was interesting to see the difference between man made

calculations and computer calculations, even if it was by a small percent the calculations were off and that could be detrimental in a giant project.