The Feed The Fish challenge involves flinging "food" into a "fishbowl" from a distance behind a safety line. The food can be any kind of projectile, and the fishbowl is a 20cmx20cm box about a metre away.
In the instructions, they suggest Nerf bullets as a projectile. We might have used Nerf if this was a target shooting challenge, but this challenge needs the projectile to be thrown an accurate distance as well as in an accurate direction. Nerf bullets are fast, but their range is a little unpredictable so we decided to try ping pong balls instead.
The first method we tried was a catapult:
We couldn't really get a good distance though. The motors needed a lot of power to lift the ball, which meant it had trouble accelerating quickly.
So we tried a different method: hitting the ball like a tennis racket:
With this new method, the weight of the moving "racket" was a lot lighter than it was when it had to also lift the ball, which meant it could build up more speed quickly and hit the ball hard enough to make it go a good distance.
Here are a couple more tests:
Open wide, fish! Here comes the food!
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