Thursday 10/28 (28 days left)

          I arrived early after an interview with Rogers Corporation (which went pretty well, thanks) and accidentally woke a lightly sleeping Chris, who’d apparently been there all night. He and I tried to get his program to run on my computer (as his was not communicating with any of our Arduinos), but we were unable due to my perplexing inability to augment the Libraries in my Arduino folder. Luckily, we were able to run it on Betsy’s computer and had a successful demo. Here’s a link to videos of various actuations we achieved: http://www.youtube.com/user/ducktrap2 (thanks to Diana for setting up a YouTube account). Our demo and presentation were well-received, especially Pat’s renderings of different patterns a grid of square cells could make when pushed out or pulled in individually. It felt great to have something functional, and we broke for lunch a satisfied group.

After lunch Bill Phillips, the research student using our class for his thesis, gave us a talk. He told us about the role that evaluations play in his and in the professors’ estimations of our learning experience in the class. It was interesting to see not only the differences in how people rated themselves as opposed to their teammates as well as how students from different disciplines rated themselves and their teammates. It seemed that the engineers were hardest on themselves, and that the class as a whole was willing to rate themselves higher than their teammates. We also discussed the role of phrasing in determining the ways in which certain students rate themselves: it seemed that the engineers were wary of the use of “design” and “artistic” in two of the five questions asked by the survey.

After this presentation we reassembled the group to discuss next steps. We set to brainstorming and had a lot of great ideas but got bogged down in determining how to mechanize our ideas in as simple and effective a way as possible. When the professors came around to discuss our progress, they told us (in not so few words) that the best way to resolve this would be to prototype and decide based on which prototypes were most effective, which is what we planned to do. Methods of actuating the push and pull of panels in our grid included air and water jets/pumps, magnets, springs, strings, and a mess of servos and DC motors. Which is just what we decided to do.