project overview

quick summary of criteria and deliverables

photo credit: Felicia Lo

This was meant to go up a while ago, but writing things in a generally comprehensible manner took a bit longer than originally anticipated. And honestly, this is still a bit of a mess, but this write-up is not a top priority, so I'm letting it go for now.

Oops.

success criteria

does your project:

• analyze and solve physics problems as related to something you care passionately about?

  • While I don't adore fashion, I do a lot of textile arts (clearly). Clothing is pretty important -- it's something that we all (hopefully) wear every day. This is, of course, an important application from a very practical point of view. On a less practical note, I just really love the beauty in creating -- in transforming something weak and disorganized into something strong and purposeful.

• use investigation skills you learned in your high school science career?

  • As I always disclaim, my relationship status with high school science could probably be best described as it's complicated. I left Gr. 9 early, missed about 99% of Gr. 10, and did Gr. 11 online with a different school. And then, I made the severely questionable decision to fast-track Gr. 12 physics in the interest of reducing courseload for fourth year (I had spares last year, so taking spares this year would eliminate the chances of having a spare next year). My high school science career has mostly been a lesson in patience, adaptation, and a whole lot of reality-checking. I think this project will definitely reflect that. On a more traditionally scientific note, however:

  • Understanding how to conduct experiments will be important to this project. To be fair, I haven't done a lot of labs over the course of my high school career (for the reasons expounded above), but I have done the paperwork. A good generalized idea of how to conduct experiments and draw conclusions is important here. And this is going nowhere, so I will stop now.

• use experiments to test laws of physics?

  • Discussion of research can be found below.

• highlight an impact on society and/or the environment?

  • There are a couple of different directions I could go with this, since I think there's really actually a lot of applications here. If we stick strictly to the textiles, tensile strength as it relates to eco-friendly fibres could be an area of concern, though not really something I can effectively test.

general guidelines

• this should be a project that matters to you

  • See above.

• you must supply all necessary materials

  • I am ordering everything online. (Order has been placed, so it is officially out of my hands for now.) If shipping fails, I can jury-rig some DIY nonsense (i.e. polyfill, straw/cardboard drop spindle), which will probably not hold up particularly well to wear and tear, but which should be good enough to evaluate a couple of factors.

• there must be a research component and also a 'show and tell' component

  • Research: I will need to do secondary research into various materials and their real-world applications. Based on resource (both time and money) constraints, I have decided to only work with a bit of Peruvian wool, so I will book looking into both other kinds of fibres and some architectural applications (i.e. metal suspensions)

  • Show and Tell: I am planning to use equal amounts of fibre to spin equal lengths of yarn, thus enabling me to measure the resultant tensile strength. If time permits, I might spin larger samples of some to knit swatches from, to demonstrate further properties of the textile. Going into more detail here seems a bit irrational, since a lot of base variables will probably depend on some preliminary testing.

• you must be safe

  • There's not anything too dangerous about any of this. Other than the danger to my ego.