Week 7

During Week 7, we proceeded with completing our final design. Our goal for this week was to make this prototype the last one and we already knew what was necessary to do for this to be possible.  

We decided that the kabob sticks were doing a better job than the wire, so we stuck with that design. Then, we kept the same material for the wings of the kite as we used in previous designs. After noticing that the kite line was promoting problems within the actual flying aspect of the kite, we decided it would be necessary to conduct further research on more efficient ways of assembling and tying the line. We found that a better method would be to cut out a triangle shape out of the multi-colored kite material and then tape the line to the material. After testing this method out, it was noticeable that the stability, while flying the kite, drastically improved.

Our biggest problem that we faced was creating that stability to allow the kite to fly more smoothly, but we also faced the problem that the head of the kite was too heavy causing it to nose-dive. By adding weight to the tail end of the kite, we were able to forgo this problem. We believed that we fixed these issues and thus we moved on to the testing and data collecting aspects. We started to collect data by measuring how far the kite would glide as well as how long we could keep it in the air for. For week 8, we plan to continue testing our final design and taking new measurements.