Wallace and Gromit

What was the design problem?
The Wallace and Gromit challenge seemed like a whole different new challenge. The previous challenges involved building a car like structure. Now our team had to build a house with gadgets to move objects.

What were the mechanical issues you had to deal with? How did you make these decisions?

Only one thing to do that we always do. Jump and and start building whatever and see what worked and what didn't. Each of our groups build whatever and we bounced ideas back and forth and gain new ideas as we saw each others gadgets.

What pre-existing knowledge on your team, how did you come up with ideas and solutions?

We watched the Wallace and Gromit movie and that help out a lot. We were thinking outrageous solutions to the challenge, but decided copying the movie we make building the house easier.

When you made changes, did you get the expected results?

We didn't really make any changes to our house, because the design was really simple in the first place. Nothing much to modify. The design consisted of a bed that flips the little lego person over and they just falls into a chair right under the bed on the first floor. Nothing special, but it gets the job done.

Talk about the interplay of adjustments between hardware and programming.

The programming was not all that hard. We wanted the house to do this, so we told the computer to tell it to do just that. Programming was just giving the computer instructions to tell the gadgets in the house what to do. Getting around to know where all the buttons and functions of the programming software was a bit of a challenge at first, but isn't everything new just as hard?

If you are someone who is mechanically sophisticated, did you coach those on your team who know less and make sure that they got a chance to grow in their skills and understanding?

I was not at all a building design person. I'm more of a person that follows instructions and does what people assign me to do or tell people what to do. In terms of creativity and invention is not my area. So, I contributed to the group with my programming skills. The group told me what the house needed to do and I was able to do just that.

Tug of War

At first we need to figure out what type of robot to make. A fast, light one to pull the opponents robot out of the ring before they can start pulling or a heavy duty one to slowly pull the robot out to victory.

Now that we were to incorporate the motor and electronic components of the robot, we had to change our design to fit around it. Building around that spendy block was not that bad because we had a solid base to build around. Since our theme was tug of war, we knew that traction on the ground and weight would help make our robot more competitive.

Not much was difference from the last design except now we added a big block on some electronic components to it. Programming the thing was easy because all we had to do was make it go forward. No need for new skills. Everything was just trial and error and was easily figured out. programming wasn't hard either. All we had was to just turn the motor and keep turning till we turn the power off.

At the very last minute before the competition, we tried adding a few more things to gain traction and weight, but it didn't do much in the outcome later. Nothing fell apart like before, so that was just nice.

Rubber Band

What was the design problem?

Where do we start building? First time we touched the legos and wondering how to put the pieces together that weren't just square/rectangle blocks.

What were the mechanical issues you had to deal with? How did you make these decisions?

Fitting the odd pieces together were hard. We first had to figure out how to make the pieces connect in the first place. Weird tubeby pieces hooking with little holes in blocks. How do they go together snuggly?

What pre-existing knowledge on you team, how did you come up with ideas solutions?
Apparently, I was not skilled at all with constructing with legos, but some teams members were very creative with building with legos. They manage to build an okay design in the short amount of time we had. We just played around quite a bit with the pieces.

When you made changes, did you get the expected results?

When we made changes, some parts of the robot would fall apart. The robot seemed like a delicate thing to tamper with if the base of the body was not stable connecting the wheels.