Last year Carter got to go to the district science fair and won gold so this year there were high expectations, mostly from him. The easy thing for him to do would have been to just use his passion project and build a science fair project around that, however he felt he needed something he could test rather than just demonstrating hydraulic force. We offered him many suggestions but in the end he decided he wanted to hammer nails. That's it, just hammer nails into wood. There was an example on one of the sites he felt he was allowed to reference and from there he had to build a science fair project.
Once again he paired up with his best friend Jevin and for this project it was even more important that the two of them do the vast majority of the work themsleves. The hypothesis centered around whether the density of wood impacted how hard it was to hammer a nail into it. I helped by providing 8 different types of wood with different densities and I also happened to have a small shoemakers anvil that they could use to do the hammering. It was important that they had a consistent hammering force so they used the anvil and a pulley and built a tower that would drop the anvil on the nail. They then did this for 5 nails per board and determined their results. I was a bit surprised based on how simple the effort was but they created a great presentation board and were able to speak to their whole project. Once again they were finalists for their class and school and got to go to the District fair where they won gold. Even higher expectations for next year.
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