Project Description:
In math/physics and humanities we did a project called Into The Wild, during this project we read a the book Into The Wildby Jon Krakauer. The book was about a young man named Chris McCandless who leaves society to go survive in the Alaskan wilderness with little to no supply's. We wanted to explore our adventures spirit like Chris had. We would do this by going on a 3 day 2 night trip into the desert so that we could escape our normal lives and experience the wild. During this project we created 3 items to help us a compass, headlamp, and soda can stove, we would use each item on our trip. We were to cook 2 meals with our soda can stoves. We soldered our headlamps circuit boards together in class and designed our compasses using Adobe Illustrator and had them cut out for us using the laser cutter. We took out all our equipment and marched Into The wild. |
CompassHow it Works:
A magnet is a piece of material that's atoms are so ordered that the material attracts itself to other magnetic materials because of its external magnetic field. A magnets magnetic field looks almost like a butterfly shape with both of the wings being one of the poles. With magnets opposites attract the North end of a magnet attracts the south end of another magnet. A magnetic field is a region around a magnetic material where the magnetic force can act upon other objects. Earth even has a magnetic field this is why compasses point north. We made our compasses in Adobe Illustrator in a specific format so that the laser cutter could read our drawings and cut them into clear acrylic. We then had to heat up a needle and poke it through the back of our compasses to mount the magnetic needle on it so that it will rotate freely and point to its magnetic north. |
Soda Can StoveWhat we used them for:
Over the trip we had to cook two meals dinner and breakfast, or stoves run of denatured alcohol a flammable liquid that burns at a high temperature. Using this factor to our advantage we cooked food on our stoves. On dinner of the 1st day I made bacon cheddar cheese burgers I must say they were very good. The picture above is of my stoves and my food cooking. Because we did not have a place to mount our pots and pans on I decided to make a wall of rocks so that the heat would be trapped and forced up at my pot. This worked surprisingly well as everything go super hot and was able to cook a burger in no time. I did the same for breakfast on the 3rd day and made a huge stack of pancakes. In the end I was surprised how well the stoves worked because I thought they might not. |
Head LampHow it Works:
My head lamp runs of a power source of 4.5 volts aka 3 triple A’s, in my circuit there is one ten ohm resistor. The circuit is put in series where the light bulbs we used LED’s were put in parallel. Because the LED’s are in parallel if a connection brakes or the LED is broken the other 2 will still work because there are multiple paths that the electricity can travel to complete the circuit. LED’s can only take a certain amount of voltage any more will brake the LED so a resistor was put in the circuit. A resistor is a device that lowers and or controls the voltage/current that passes through it. To actually build our circuit boards we had to first break down a very confusing set of steps of how to build it. We then followed each step and soldered all the wires on our board together. We used 3 LED’s in our circuits along with the resistor to create a total resistance of 75 ohm’s. |