Whenever the topic of hot air balloons came up, I've always imagined how fun it would be to go and ride one. Actually constructing one though, would never have crossed my mind. Then again, anything is possible, especially when it comes to Mr Chung's SES class. Just like with the egg landers, the hot air balloons had to be made of straws. This time around though, we had birthday candles and a large plastic bag ( maybe the size was a bit of an overkill :P ) in order to make our structure lift off the ground.
As if the whole idea of making a working hot air balloon out of thin straws wasn't hard enough, we had to reuse the straws from our egg lander! Good thing we decided not to cut up our straws, or else we would really be in trouble. Since our limit was 10 straws, we tried to keep our design plain and simple. We were explained that the simpler the structure is, the lighter it would be, and the lighter it would be, the easier it would be for the candles to lift it. Unfortunately, we didn't have too much time to plan the design out, as we spent most of the time actually taking apart our egg lander rather than deciding on what to do for the hot air balloon. Therefore, when we actually started building the structure, we were pretty much panicking (or at least I was) for the entire time.
For the design, we originally wanted to make a simple X shape with the straws so we could put the candles on there, but then we wanted to go for a bigger surface area for the base of the hot air balloon once we realized how big the plastic bag was going to be. Then, we went with five straws in the middle as the base, make the structure look like a star.
We had a big problem though; because we kept on changing our ideas with the egg lander, we ended up bending and playing around with the straws alot. Now when we reuse the same straws, they become quite flimsy, and we were unsure whether it would hold the candles or not. Then, we had the idea of connecting the straws together in the star so that they wouldn't be as weak. Our idea did work in terms of making the structure stronger, but we always made the structure a lot heavier than it could have been.
Frustrated, and caving under the pressure, we just decided that it would have been better to stick to our original plan of the base and just make it a five straw star, with extended ends to attach to the plastic bag.
Since we took into consideration of the weight of the candles, we decided that 5 candles might be a little bit better as 10 candles would make our hot air balloon way too heavy to lift.
The biggest challenge for us was probably the giant plastic bag. It was impossibly hard to work with, and we were afraid of cutting it into anything smaller in case something went wrong. Even though the bag was trimmed into a smaller size, it was still a lot bigger than the base, and continued to give us problems with the attachment of the base to the bag. In the end, we didn't have a chance to test it, as we were still struggling with the plastic bag when the tests for the hot air balloon was over.
Some improvements that could be made for next time are once again, being efficient with our time. The indecision with what we should be doing definitely took up alot of our time. This is a thing that should have been previously researched at home.
Really, we should have just cut up the irritating bag. It would have made our lives a lot simpler, and even if our structure didn't work, we could have at least tested it. Oh well, at least we'll know what to do for the future if we ever have to build a hot air balloon out of straws again...?
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