Candid Student Reports

The following (emails) were written by members of the TIP Tapper program during the seventh day of the program. Some elements may have been removed for various reasons, but the text that remains is in the student's own words.

 
through the course of the construction of our model, 
it has become aparent that a good deal of science 
must be understood to come upon an acurate model of 
Frisbee flight.  We have perfected ( if possible) 
the algorithms for verticle and horizontal motion, 
but we have met a recent difficulty in computing 
variance (movement on the z axis).  even though 
difficult, the feelong is still optimistic even if 
a bit strained.


 Ben, Eric and Harding
 

 
Today we changed direction slightly and decided not 
to use javascript, decreasing the workload 
considerably. Our spreadsheet has given accurate 
values for the hole placement on a G flute, which 
is our major goal for the model. We've found a .wav 
sound of a PVC-pipe G flute being played, and it 
will definitely find its way into the presentation.


 Jason and Ryan
 

 
We spent most of the day working on obtaining and 
mapping depth of the ocean.  We also fixed our 
problems with the model in excel(We had to convert 
the degree measurements into radians). 

We finally found information on the depths, and 
should be able to use it.


 Kevin, Russell ad Alex
 

 
Today was VERY frustrating!!!  The power went out 
earlier which delayed our progress.  When it came 
back on we began to plan our STELLA model, then at
about 2:00 this afternoon we were told that we 
couldn't use that model-and that just sucked.  So 
now we are trying something else.  Bob2 gave us a 
program called curvefit to use for our model, and 
we are going to see where that takes us tomorrow, 
and we are hoping that we will make some progress!!!


 Liz and Bev
 

 
I think the main phrase for today was, "Thank you, 
Dr. Rice!"  We were able to talk to him on the 
speaker phone today, and after the conversation, 
something clicked and we were able to get our model 
down and even modeled the enzyme's natural substrate.  
The other two members of our team got a little stuck 
today on their STELLA model, but after a talk with 
Bob2, they were able to redo the model and are 
close to finishing it.  We were able to get a lot 
done on our Power Point presentation today, which 
will extend into evening session.  However, the 
more we seem to get done and the more we learn, the 
more it seems we need to talk about in our 
presentation, so we have to  organize so much, and 
it's really frustrating. 


 Renee and Madhu
 

 
Today we got to talk to Dr. Rice from England on the 
phone.  The power went out, but he called back and 
gave us a whole lot of relevant information.  We 
got a lot of our questions answered, which was very 
helpful.  In our model, we've decided to scrap 
everything concerning bacteria for now, and focus 
on enzyme activity, which seems to be working well 
so far.  yay.


 Matt and Natalie