Project One

And this is the third time I have started this post. GAH!

On the third of March we started Project One. Create an Interactive Drawing Machine out of Lego Nxt. We had two weeks before we had to present our robot to the class on the 18th.

My group made our robot draw circles with a whiteboard marker pen on the ground. We called it the Vandal Bot. It went through many reincarnations after its first construction but nothing lethal. we used the base for the basic Tribot in our robot.
First we were going to have the pen out back and have the colour sensor out front pointing at the ground to catch the change in paper colour when we put different coloured pieces of cellophane across the light source, Unfortunately this didn't work so we decided to use darkness and light.
Our robot would sense when it was light and sit there patiently then when it when dark it would go crazy vandalizing, thrus The Vandal Bot. Then we had to give it a reason and a personality. We decided to make it draw circles as its vandal signature, because that was its eye. Its always watching you, waiting till you least expect it to take revenge for being rebuilt and disassembled all the time.
We also gave it a cape.

Thursday - Thursday

So... I've been lazy. Been a while since my last blog during orientation week.

On Thursday we did, what our lecturers called Situational Shuffle. In teams of four we were given small rectangular pieces of paper with instruction and assigned a role, controler (who read out the instructions), actuator (who followed the instructions), Tracker (who tracked our movments) and the sensor (who recorded our actions).
Then we had to write a reflective statement and put together the pictures and video into a presentation of our Situation Shuffle. I did some animation for ours --------->
I also did an animation of numbers rolling past the screen (counting pedestrians) and two cartoonish characters darting round the screen (follow the red lady).
As for my reflective statement - I wasn't that excited about this really, what made it fun was the people in my group and their jokes. I also found all the walking tiring. I believe this activity was to help us get used to teamwork, and to teach us that being in a team meant working to our strengths and giving our role in the group our own special touch. I also believe the presentation afterwards was to help us with visualising our ideas, an important part to our course and hopefully, future career. It showed us that we had to have more planing before we jumped into the action so we knew what we were doing and got what we wanted in the end.

Friday we all presented our presentations. We had a little problem with ours as we wanted to put our movie onto a pdf but needed a lectured to show us how, which meant we were doing it at the last possible moment and that we didn't have sound. Afterwards there was a BBQ and the year 3 pitches which I didn't stay for. But, I got my macbook before I went home.

Monday we started on the Lego Nxt, building robots.
Monday morning we were told to split into groups of four an design a chess piece. My group designed The Atlas. A piece made to annoy both players, able to move three squares in any direction the Atlas is designed to block your opponent. It cannot take out any enemy pieces and starts in the middle of the board. It expands to cover all eight squares surrounding the one it stands on when moved, if the opponents piece is in one those square already it is unable to move while the Atlas resides beside it. When we had designed our chess pieces to the set condition we explained them and pinned the to the walls then had a look at the other groups. Some had some inventive ideas but had confusing explanations. I particularly like the Manic which flipped each turn and had a different set of moves.



We then had to make them out of Lego Nxt and program them to move to their protocol (The moves of each chess piece). Our way of translating our chess piece moves into robot program was to drove forward so far, then spin for ages.

We demonstrated this on Tuesday to the class. Then had races/robot fights. Afterwoods we had a new project. Create a robot in keeping with our chess pieces style and characteristics to come into the room from the foyer and knock on Pats office door/ask her for help.
This was very frustrating as we had ideas but not the expertise to program the robot to do what we wanted. Then when we could program something it didn't turn out how we wanted. In the end we kept our original idea of banging into the door repeatedly for knocking, but ended up using the colour sensor and having the robot turn when it sensed the colour yellow.

The robots were then put into action this morning, Thursday. Then we got a new project. To make an interactive drawing machine.

Social Mapping

So...

On Tuesday we did social mapping. We were spit into 4 groups of 10-11 people then given a fake wall. We were asked a bunch of questions and wrote the answers on post it notes which we stuck on a wall around another post it with our name. 

Then we stuck pins in the post its and stung yarn around them. This, I believe was to make it easy to tell which answers belonged to who but made it impossible to read the names on the middle post its.

Then we strung yarn between all the same answers. we had to name each line and write it down

Then we had a brake for lunch.

When we came back we were introduced to gephi, and told how to input the dater from the map above to make a graph. Unfortunately I didn't edit my graph in the preview mode and it printed completely different.

The next day everyone brought in there gephi graphs, we picked the best one in our group and developed it.

We also had an introduction of the 3D labs.