Team Coolspeedbot: first feather weight robot

[R9000]

Ok, I think you're going a bit crazy with the squareds. When we put something like 'm^2' or 'm^3' on the end of something, it's just a unit. It basically means that we've already squared it.

For example, let's say I had a square of side length 2m. If I wanted to find the area, I'd do 2 x 2 = 4 m^2, just like if you were to do 2^2 = 4. Basically, you're counting how many square metres (literally 1m by 1m squares) you can fit inside the area that you're measuring. Same with volume, it's how many 1m x 1m x 1m cubes you could fit inside the volume that you're measuring.

So when we write 'm^2' or 'm^3', it's just a unit, you don't use it for calculation, other than making sure that all of your numbers are in the same (or compatible) units when you do the calculations. In your case:
0.28 m x 0.085 m = 0.0238 m^2. (Area in square metres)
0.0238 m^2 x 0.005 m^2 = 0.000119 m^3. (Volume in cubic metres)
0.000119 m^3 x 7850 kg/m^3 = 0.93415 kg (Mass in kilograms)

Just a final bit of useful info, the unit on the end can represent a calculation that was done to get the figure. An obvious example is km/h. If you want to measure the speed of a car, you can drive it for a known distance at a constant speed, and then divide the distance in km by the time it took to travel there. This leaves you with your speed in literally how many kilometres the car can cover per hour, and the unit km/h represents that you're dividing km by hours (km/h). Likewise with density. If you want to figure out the density of steel, you get a certain known volume of it (like a 1m by 1m by 1m cube) and see how much it weighs. You then divide that weight (or mass more accurately) in kg by the volume of the cube to get kg/m^3, literally how many kilograms the material will weigh per cubic metre that you have.