School: Montessori Academy of Cincinnati

Student: Maks Wenda

Teacher: Amy Weller

Grade: 5th

Subject: Science

Description: My project was to build a trebuchet. I wanted to test how far it can shoot a golf sized ball. I started by watching several videos on YouTube to understand how trebuchet works. By the way, I found out a few exciting facts e.g., in the Middle Ages, catapults were not used to tear down castle walls but rather on against the knight on the battlefield. Building a catapult is not an easy matter. First, I prepared the design and calculated all the dimensions. The long arm needed to be 4x longer than the short one. The sling was about the long arm length. Next, I made a cardboard 1:2 scale prototype to check if all the dimensions match and whether the construction will be stable. I cut out trebuchet’s template elements and traced them on a foam core board. I cut all the parts and glued the structure with a hot glue gun. I made sure that the construction is firm and stable. The ball weighed 6 grams, and I prepared a 900 grams counter-weight using a collection of my marbles. That’s 150x more than the payload I wanted to launch. A pouch was made of black industrial tape. The longest shot was 20′ 3″.

We shot a video showing the whole project: https://youtu.be/NVuOxVEROaE