It's Raining Cubes (Science Fair 2008)

History

    Shortly after our success with the International Space Station project in 2007, Mrs. Bhagdev tasked us with starting our science projects. Me and Dennis Wu immediately teamed together, but Rajan Sheth decided to go solo on this one. Our initial idea was to actually do something related to our ISS project, specifically a simulation of the effects of centrifugal force. In the end, however, we went with something simpler - a physics simulation of falling cubes. The main point of our project was to include support for air resistance calculations and terminal velocity. I didn't know it then, but what we were basically doing was numeric integration.

    This was one of my first forays into creating computer programs centered around math. I did the coding (using C#), and Dennis ended up doing most of the project documentation. After working through several issues, we ended up with a simple terminal program that allowed the user to enter several peices of information about the initial state of the cube, then showed each step in the calculation as the cube fell. The flowchart below was created by me at the time to give an overveiw of the code.

    However, many people felt unimpressed by the text-only terminal. In order to add more pizzazz, I created a graphical demo that used our simulation as a backend, but used the Irrlicht Game Engine to render a 3D version of the falling cubes, displaying both drag and gravitational acceleration. You can see pictures of the demo below.

    We easily took the first prize at HISEF, the regional fair, and went on to AzSEF, where we took 4th place in the category.

Awards Won

HISEF - 1st place in Computer Science
AzSEF - 4th place in Computer Science

Press Links

Chandler students compete in new state science fair

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