The first day we were introduced into Doctor Neato's principles of engineering/robotics which is co-taught by Mr.Miller. Soon after we were given a tour of the shop which is where we will work on our projects later on in the year. Mr.Miller lead the tour for half of the class as he went over some basic safety rules clarifying when and where things will be allowed/appropriate while describing the uses of nearly each machine that was in the shop.
The next day we played a name game where we had to use our memory of people's names. Doctor Neato had our half of the class form a line and one by one we had to say everyone's name before us and ours once done.
Then on Wednesday we formed our groups for the wednesday challenge. This week's challenge is to make a bridge out of thin spaghetti being over two feet long and being able to support the most weight out of the groups. Here are the rules Spaghetti Bridge Challenge Rules
Thursday we began construction of our bridge by sketching all of our ideas for the structure/design of the spaghetti bridge. We decided to combine all of our designs so that we could attempt to include everyone at once and also pour a bunch of glue all over one piece of pasta.
On Friday we learned how to create a website with the help of Dr.Neato and a few other "veterans" on our assigned computers. I was pretty much fine by myself without help as I was able to figure some things out while going along.
We kicked off the week of August 15 by following Edgars lead as he demonstrated how to enhance our newly created website on Friday. Dr.Neato taught the whole class some extra things and gave us some tips and shortcuts to improve our websites.
On Tuesday we continued working with the computers but was quite frustrating because the internet was complete garbage. Maddie led us us today as she and Dr. Neato showed us some more tips and tricks so that we could focus more of our time to our projects.
We of course worked on our Wednesday challenge today as we began testing our prototypes and creating new bridges. Our first bridge with mainly glue held up really well but broke when a brick fell on it snapping it in half before we could find out how much the bridge can actually hold up.
The next day we were back on the computers and updated our websites. Once done with that we were instructed to download a copy of the Wednesday challenge
On Friday we continued to work on our bridges as we had only poured the whole can of glue on just one side. We moved on to glue the other half as the wax was stuck to the bottom of the first half and had to peel it all off.
The week started with Dr.Neato preparing a lesson for us and having Aran drive us through Google Sketchup so that we could get a vague idea of how to use it for further projects. We first had to put two pictures from Dr.Neato's onto ours and then export a screenshot on google sketch up of the same angle of the picture on the photograph to our website.
Today we learned how finally input our pictures taken from the web or just taken from our phones. At first I was very baffled and lost in the process that Dr.Neato had shown the class how write the formula for it in http language.
On this Wednesday we quite "unexpectedly" worked on our spaghetti bridges with another test run that was delayed due to the fact that somebody cut in front of us in line. Then once it was our turn to test our bridges, our most successful bridge was unable to stay on top of the concrete blocks so we had to go back to gluing more spaghetti pieces.
Today we worked on our websites so that we could further our quality and quantity of our entries including this one along with this background. Thanks to someone crashing the filezilla I was unable to update my website in time to view it at home so I had to download notepad++ on my home computer and use my flash drive to add it to filezilla.
On Friday we were given a presentation by the "veterans" about the current ideas for the JPL invention challenge and were visited by the illusive Mr.Wilton. He has been around for a while helping out the students here and giving out advice to further their experience in the classroom and the shop. Here is Mr.Willtons website
Today we did the most interesting thing in the world...working/updated our websites. Thankfully the Filezilla server crashed at the end of class so me uploading my website earlier really paid off in the long run excelling my rate of concentration and lowering my now all time low of academic stress in one of the easiest classes ever (so far).
Tuesday was one of the most angering days ever when returning to the shop and being greeted with two deliberately damaged bridges and just one day until the real test on Thursday.We were pretty much told it sucks to suck by Dr.Neato which was fine because it emphasized the environment of the real world and not just our little world in school and home.
Alright so Wednesday was sucky and became a lot more sucky when the protruding beams on one of our bridges fell off of the area where it was supposed to dry which sucked the hopeand optimism left from Yesterday. We fixed the bridge and I spent most of the time on my phone because yet again someone took my computer so I had to update my website with vague memories on Thursday which I found out to be quite a disappointment.
Finally testing day was here for our bridge(s) and we chose to go with our mainly glue bridge that had protruding beams from both sides of the bridge. Well it turns out Thursday wasn't the greatest day because of some miscommunication between a "builder" and an instructor during construction so we were eliminated thanks to the beams touching the sides of the block.Spaghetti Bridge Wednesday Challenge Form