Float Your Boat

Our experiment was to make a flotation device that could hold the most pennies before sinking using only a piece of aluminum foil, 2 marshmallows, 2 toothpicks, and a 15cm piece of masking tape. The challenging part was coming up with a design/plan the would work and float well with weight added. Ours was able to hold 24 pennies before sinking. Our boat was designed like an origami boat and floated very well in the water. It was about 6 inches long.

My hypothesis was: If the boat can float well then it will be able to hold lots of pennies because weight should not affect it that much as it is like a real boat.  

In the end we found out that our design floated well but was only able to hold 24 pennies and other designs held up better. Higher edges seemed to work a lot better. My hypothesis was refuted because our design did hold up good but once we added pennies it started struggling. The fact that it was struggling goes against what my hypothesis said about how weight should not affect how well it floats when pennies are added. The biggest error we made could have been where we put the pennies in the boat. The way to improve this experiment’s design would be to have a different boat design, mostly one that can float but also has high edges.

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