You would assume that a principles of engineering class would make things like tools, machines, and things alike–but not Mr. Creen’s class. Here, the projects are a little more…destructive. This semester, the assignment was to design and build working replicas of medieval ballistic weapons and projectiles.

On Friday, March. 14, approximately 20 students broke into small groups and decided which device they were going to make. Some ideas students could have had would be things like catapults, cannons, trebuchets, bow and arrows, daggers and more.

However, building the weapon was only half the battle–the real challenge was making it accurate.

“For our Principles of Engineering class, we do a ballistics lab,” Creen said. “They’re supposed to find out how far the projectile will go, the distance, the speed, and figure it out all with trig, and they need to build some type of medieval ballistic device to accomplish this task.” 

To figure out how far the projectile will go, along with the speed and distance, students had to dive into the math behind the mechanics. Each adjustment to the arm length or counter weight required recalculating sin, cosine, and tangent functions to estimate distance and speed.

“We are making a catapult and it has to cut through some pieces of paper, and we’re making it out of wood and nails,” Alex Daut (10) said.