Bicycle Ice Cream

Bicycream 

By: Margaux, Ermie and Theo

           For BPC’s Maker Faire, 2019, our group decided to base our project around making ice cream while biking in place. Our project also incorporated the idea of the motivating people to work by having a sweet end goal in mind; the only way to obtain the reward of your exercising, the ice cream, is to bike and actually churn the ice cream by cycling. We decided to do this project because some people won’t exercise without a reward,or are lazy and need a way to motivate themselves. Now, we have found a solution to this problem: Ice cream. We discovered a way for someone to make ice cream while biking, and the only way to obtain this cool, refreshing treat is to go on a bike ride in your house while binging on your favorite Netflix show or around the park while enjoying the fresh air. 
First, we envisioned a frame around the back wheel with a cylindrical box attached in the middle. The power would be generated by the back wheel. Since the container was touching the wheel while it spun, the container, in contact with the wheel, would spin as well. We didn’t prototype this idea, which was a mistake that ultimately made it harder to complete our finished project, but we did brainstorm for quite some time and figured out different ways to make it work.

           To assemble all the pieces, we went to Ace Hardware to get a PVC cross-connector. We put the bike head through the cross and attached two pieces of PVC on either side of the seat. Then, we put a T-connector on both ends of the PVC so we could add two new longer pieces of PVC that  extended all the way and rested near the back wheel. Finally, we attached the container to these pipes by drilling holes into either end sticking a wooden dowel through the lid and bottom. The dowel continued into the PVC pipes that were already drilled with holes. With the box in between the pipes, it rested on the wheel and spun with it. 
This is what it looks like:

We were inspired to do this project because we had immediately known that we wanted to do something centered around ice cream, but were unsure of what. One of our group members had previously made ice cream in plastic bags and found it to be successful and easier than using an ice cream machine. We needed a simple and portable way to make it at school,  so we thought of homemade ice cream in plastic bags. After presenting our ideas to the teacher, we decided that, even though it was a good project, we needed more. With that, we turned it into bicycle ice cream! The objective our our new-formed plan was to motivate people to exercise by giving them a reward to work for. They have to earn it; if they don’t pedal, there is no ice cream. We were stuck and couldn’t find anything to do for Maker Faire but our brilliant, smart, ingenious, creative science teacher, Ms. Mytko suggested we do something very "makery," like a thing that was powered by a bike. We also wanted to do something with ice cream so we combined the two ideas and created our project.

           A challenge that we faced was getting the PVC to stay in place. As you can see in the photo above,  a member of our group is holding the PVC pipes so that they would stay in place, but when no one was holding them it would slide off the wheel and bump around, therefore causing it to not turn as smoothly when we were pedaling. To solve this problem a member in another group suggested that we use wire and attach it to the bike itself, and after we tried this, it started to work a lot better. As a result, the ice cream did not slide around as much, and overall came out a better consistency. At first, I was reluctant because I wanted to base the project off of the bike exclusively. Eventually, we did it with the help of the other group members. It stayed in place pretty well even though we had to use the borrowed item to do so.

         We learned many things on the way to creating our final, finished project. Among those many, the ones that stand out the most are adaptability, making things up on the fly, and that even if you mess up, there is always a way to fix it or make it better. We learned adaptability because our project started out as one simple thing that gradually changed, a lot at first, and then gradually over the course of our project. We learned that making up thing whilst in the middle of doing something, or figuring out that something doesn’t work, came in handy when we couldn’t get the container to stay put on top of the wheel. In the very beginning of our process, when we were drilling holes into the PVC pipes, we would keep either making them too big or too small. Whenever that happened, we would just start over, either on a new pipe or on the opposite end. These are skills that other people attempting to do similar projects would be better off learning earlier on.

           If we had more time to complete the project, since we had a pretty good basic start to it, I think we would have just finessed it more, made it run more smoothly, and made larger quantities of ice cream to share with everybody. Our bike-powered ice cream machine worked, but it was only the base platform of what we could accomplish.

         The estimated cost we have of our project is very low. Most of the materials we used we found in and around our school, or people had at home already and were fine with bringing them in for use. The only things people in our group purchased was a four-way PVC pipe connector, purchased at Ace Hardware for around $5, and a half gallon of half n’ half, purchased also for $5. Our total project cost was $10. The only outside resource we really used to base our ideas off of, a video as well as a website, was a great example of someone using bicycle ice cream for theirs, as well as other people’s benefits. They made ice cream on a hot, sunny summer day, went for a nice relaxing bike ride, and shared some homemade ice cream with friends and strangers. It was also just a great project in general, and surely inspire other makers to do the same and more.     
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbKHoCDwIOg

Making a Duct Tape Pencil Case

In this project, we were working to make a duct tape pencil case. We were going to use the pencil case, but because of a misunderstanding we lost it. Our inspiration for this project was that we didn't have a pencil case and we lose our pencils really easily, so we thought it would be good to make a pencil case.

The biggest challenge for us was making four sheets of double sided duct tape sheets. Due to the fact that when we touched duct tape it stuck to us,  combining two sheets of duct tape was extremely difficult and annoying.

When making a duct tape pencil case, we learned that it’s not as easy as it looks. Duct tape is really sticky and when you accidentally get two pieces of duct tape stuck together, you can’t get get it unstuck.

If we had more time, we would make a cleaner looking pencil case and we would make it into a supreme pencil case.

If you are able to be patient and calm, this project will be 100 times easier. Also, you need to get the right materials.

Estimated cost; 17.77

We lost ours, so here is a picture from google:

Here is the book we used on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Tape-Make-101-Duct-Activities/dp/1438001355/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=duct+tape+book&qid=1559605689&s=gateway&sr=8-2

Climate Change Board Game: Terrafirma - Augie, Nate, and Eli

Maker Faire Blog Post about “Terrafirma"

By: Eli Mckoy Beiser, Augie Nice, and Nate Sommer

Our Maker Faire project was called Terrafirma. It was a board game where you would try to run a civilization. You had to make sure your civilians had food, water, and energy everyday. you had to build farms, water purifiers, and factories to provide those things. For everyday your civilians had these things, you got a point. Now for the hard part, getting these things for your civilians required you to put Co2 into your civilization’s atmosphere, we would add 10 Co2 to your atmosphere for every farm, water purifier, and factory you had per day. Once you added 400 Co2 to the atmosphere, your civilization would come to an end. So your goal as the player was to get as far as you could while keeping your civilians alive. The objective of our project was to make people more aware of how hard it is to provide people with their needs, while also balancing the trouble of climate change. Our project has very specific examples, and there are more problems you will encounter in running a civilization. One thing we thought was that people thought we should just get rid of fossil fuels, but those are how tons of people get energy. So our objective was not to tell people that fossil fuels are good and everyone should use them, but that thoughts saying to just get rid of fossil fuels should be given a better solution with more thought, we’re letting people know that solving climate change is a bit more complex than some people think. We were inspired to do this project because we have been talking about climate change a lot in school, whether it be a movie about it, or a science project about it, we talked about it a lot. This made us think more about that problem and we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to make people more aware. We only had two weeks to make this project so we had to work quickly while still making people aware of the complexity in climate change. In this time we think we still managed to make a fun game that still communicated the message we trying to get across.

The biggest challenge throughout the process of making this game was figuring out what our numbers would be, and how they would work. For example what number of Co2 would they have to have for their civilization to end. We overcame this by making a plan one day, making sure it worked, and then just changing things that didn’t work. For around 2 days we were testing numbers with people in the class to see what did not work for us. In fact, on the day of the faire we had to change a few numbers to make sure everything worked smoothly. In the end all our numbers worked fine, but it took awhile to find the numbers that worked.

So, Terrafirma was full of ups and downs. However, we learned a lot in the process: How to make the numbers work so that it was possible to play the game, how to adapt our original idea to fit constraints and problems that came up during our work process, and how to stick with a project even when it starts to look hopeless. But when we were done, we still felt like there was so much more that we could have done. For example, if we had more time, we would have made the game more pleasing to the eye, as we kind of had to rush the cutting and gluing of the buildings, they were made of cardboard which made it harder to look perfect. We also would have added more variables so there were more than one strategy to play. However, if you want to make a climate change board game, there are some things that we would suggest. First, plan everything! We thought that things would fall into place as we worked, but this was not the case. In addition, don’t rush the making of the game itself. It is very important that it looks polished so that people want to come and play your game. Lastly, play test as much as possible. The more you play test, the more likely it is that you will catch errors and make the game more fun to play and less hard to run.

In our project we used all school resources: paint and markers from the art room, cardboard and cardboard scissors from the maker room, hot glue from the science room, wood from Ms. Hills farm. So we spent no extra money on our project.

Sources:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/carbon-dioxide-emissions-rise-to-24-million-pounds-per-second/