Group Reflection: We started by planning on the first day to build the Parthenon. We hadn’t thought out the electronics portion of it quite yet but really wanted to cement our design down. Our original roles were: Programmer: Megan Builder: Chris, Megan Project Manager: Sara Designer: Sara, Chris However, as the project went on, Chris focused mostly on designing the cardboard and trees while Sara ended up building most of it with some help from Megan. It took us several prototypes on paper to best optimize our gingerbread and even then we still needed to use cardboard. After two days of planning our Parthenon on paper, Sara created the ai file and we laser cut it the next day. From there we were able to assemble and troubleshoot any width issues as well as begin to figure out where our circuitry and interactivity would come into play. We knew that we wanted to make it light up, but as for the second element we weren’t sure. Since so many other groups were doing music and that can get annoying in the cafeteria we wanted to do something different. Megan suggested making it look like it was snowing with a fan and some clear string with “snow” on it. After realizing that it would take too long to actually find a fan and wire it in our arduino and get it to work reliably, I decided to use a motor to spin a tree. In putting the circuitry together I struggled with getting the motor to respond to the code so I decided to switch to a servo controlled by a potentiometer which would allow for more controlled slower spinning. The lights were easy to wire. For the physical implementation of the circuitry it was a little hard to actually get the circuits to not fall apart while they were being pulled through the cardboard. Chris did a really good job making the trees look good. They took a long time to paint and decorate and they look amazing. Overall it was a super fun project and we each learned something new about circuitry, overall design and combining all the elements to create our final “house”.
There are pictures in the folder labeled pictures: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QL8h0S5o_cLx7p3dX0AmFrQTzX7WHnRr
Self-Reflection:
While creating the Gingerbread "House," my group encountered both hardship and success. Some of the challenges consisted of designing a 3D model to meet the amount of available gingerbread, cutting out pieces of cardboard and gingerbread, glueing down columns without making a sticky mess, and optimizing the time we had to create the design. While these challenges set us back and were hard to overcome, our successes were a direct result of our troubleshooting, and in many cases made our design even better. The two roles I was assigned were a Builder and a Designer. As time went on, however, I started to focus more on designing parts that were complementary to the main structure. When we first were designing our Parthenon, I tried to take the actual dimensions of the Parthenon and scale them down to our designated workspace, thus keeping the same proportions. This took a lot of time for me to figure out and when I did, Sara and Megan had already created fixed dimensions. So for the next couple of days I tried to make myself useful, which was hard because Megan was helping Sara design and cut out the cardboard which left me to attempt to work on the Arduino circuit. I ended up contributing the least to our project by only designing/decorating the trees around the Parthenon and glueing together some parts of the gingerbread. Even though I didn't contribute as much as I would've liked to, I really did try to contribute in my team but it felt like I was being shunned out of the design process. If I were to do the same project again, I would try to be more collaborative among my groupmates and try to bring more ideas to the table that my group can grow off of. All and all, I loved this project!