Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Final Day and Exhibition

The last class day, the day of the exhibition was a very successful one. The major remaining pending task, Fluffy's room, was finally finished. Tuesday morning, I woke up thinking that I would not be able to carry out what needed to be done for that room. The sensors were just not working even though I had made an identical working one for the room of requirements. I could not figure out what the problems were for this sensor or the harp sensor. I went back into the robotics studio about an hour before class started trying to work on the castle again with a fresh mind. Soon after I started working on it, I figured out the problem, it was right in front of me the whole time. I had forgotten that I had switched the sensor wires into a different port, thus the scratch program was simply displaying the wrong sensor value.

Kaity and I worked on fixing everything up together. We suspended my small laptop speakers with pipe cleaners outside Fluffy's room, and I transferred the program onto my computer.

The difficult part was taking the project upstairs. While picking it up off the floor and on to the wheeled cart, parts of it broke off. We took the castle up in two pieces. After transferring it upstairs, Kaity and I spent about an hour to an hour and a half putting it back together and setting everything up and making sure everything was still working. By 4:30, Hogwarts was ready to go.

The exhibition was great. Kaity and I had a lot of fun, and our project was very popular. Our table was crowded by kids, and we learned that a great feature about our project was that it was built for a wide age range. For the really young children, They really enjoyed talking into the microphone of the Gryffindor common room and watching the flames in the fireplace change color.The older kids enjoyed the challenge of the Red Light Green Light Game we had disguised as the battle between Harry and Lord Voldemort. Despite it's difficulties, the kids were determined to make guide Harry to the finish line. Kaity and I enjoyed the company of a kid who went through all the challenges of the castle at least three times. We could tell that he and everyone else were really enjoying themselves.

After the hour of fun, we were sad to see our robotics design days come to an end. The next class was spent taking apart our beloved Hogwarts, (but of course Kaity and I kept some souvenirs). This was such a fun class!! I will definitely miss it.

Unfortunately, videos of the project are unavailable on my blog. I have forgotten the link of the videos posted by Professor Berg. To see a video of our project, you can see my partner's blog here:


Well this is where my blog ends. I'll really miss this class!!!

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