Robotics
This is a picture of my partner timing our robot as we were completing our task of programming our robot to drive a certain distance and measuring how long it takes.
This is a picture of the bridge my partner and I built, it ended up holding the most weight out of all the other bridges! We had to add a hammer on top because we didn't have enough weights to test our bridge!
This artifact is from my robotics unit. It is a picture of the screen with one of the programs we have done on it. This particular program is the beginning of a loop we had to do around to chairs. We had to go one meter, then go around the chair, go another meter, and go around another chair to get back to where we started. I think that my group did really well on this because we made the program, and only had to change a few things about that original program before it was right. If I had to do it again, I would make sure that the wheels are clean and the battery is charged before we tried to run the programs. I would do this because a lot of the time, the program wouldn't run right mainly because the robot wasn't consistent do to those things. That made it a lot harder to run the program correctly because you didn't know if the program was wrong or if your robot wasn't fully charged, or the wheels weren't running correctly. This assignment was pretty hard because robotics is just a hard thing to do because it;s something so different from anything else that I have done before. But, compared to other robotics assignments, this project was easy. I did like this assignment because, it was difficult but it wasn't so difficult that it took too long and you got bored of working on it. Whereas, other projects take a really long time to finish and you just want to get done and you don't end up doing your best work.
This is a picture of a challenge that we had to do for robotics. In this challenge, we had to move our robot in the path of a certain shape. The shape we made was a hexagon, originally we had planned to go in the shape of a square. The reason that we ended up making a hexagon was because our turns were not sharp enough. I thought that this assignment was pretty easy to do, all you had to do was make your robot turn, then go straight, and keep doing it over and over again. We did good on this assignment, I know this because, we got a hundred. If we had to do it again, all we would have to do is make sharper turns, then it would go in a square not a hexagon, like we had originally planned. I liked this assignment because, it was easy enough to do, but it was complex enough that you actually had to think about it.
This picture is of one of the things that we had to build for a section of robotics called "building ideas". Building ideas was a series of 31 separated step by step instructions that showed you how to build different things. We were supposed to build these to give us ideas for our next project, in which we have to build a robot that will complete a task. We did the section building ideas in partners, and I think that my partner and I did very well because we got 100s on it. Also, we did a good job of switching roles so we both knew how to build things. If we had to do it again, I would probably not change anything, because it was pretty easy and we were able to get good grades on it. This assignment was easy, because there wasn't really a wrong way to do it, you either did it or you didn't. So, if you were willing to put in the effort to put it together, then you got a good grade on. Also, there was a set of step by step instructions to go with each task that you could use to help you. I like this assignment because I really enjoy the building parts of robotics, and not so much the programming part, and building was all we did here, so it was fun for me. In conclusion, I enjoyed this part of robotics because building is my favorite part of robotics.
This is a program showing what we did for our big end of the unit project. We had to pick a task that would apply to something in our community, using at least one sensor. The task we chose was to create a program that would be able to make our robot go around to classrooms and sell granola bars to students and teachers. I thought that it would have been better to have more time to work on this project because then we could have made our program more like we had originally planned. We ended up only doing one classroom instead of our original plan to be able to figure out how to make it be able to go to many classrooms. Also, some of the groups didn't even finish the project. If I had to do the project again, I would make the robot look better by planning out my designs for the money pouch and the granola bar basket. Also, like I said, I would make the program so it could go to more than one classroom. The assignment was difficult just because of how complex the task had to be in the amount of time we had. It wasn't that hard of a program to do, but we did't have much time. I did like this assignment though, because we had a more complex thing to do instead of just the little tiny programs we had to do in the previous parts of the unit.