Track: High School and Middle School STEM Competition

Abstract

Have you ever wondered why tanks use the continuous track design instead of just regular wheels?  What are the advantages and disadvantages behind this design? This STEM project is to study continuous track design by playing the hill climb racing video game, and applying Minitab statistics to determine the positive and negative aspects of it. The benefit of this project is to research and explore an interesting topic and have fun playing video games at the same time.  While doing the project, we will use the Mountain stage in the game, the stage with the most extreme terrain and assess five various cars; Hotrod, Moon lander, Super off-road, tank and hovercraft.  Each vehicle has a different wheel design or continuous track design. We will compare their performances based on the distance they can climb on the mountains. Our hypotheses is we want to determine whether there is any measurement repeatability, so that players could duplicate the similar result to prove the playing patterns are less-human dependent. The other objective is to determine whether continuous track design actually is the better wheel design with several merits to overcome the several challenges of the Mountain stage.  This paper will combine STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in demonstrating the advantages of using the Continuous Track Design.