Building a Robot
Every Friday I have three different two hour classes, and one of those is a robotics class. During the first quarter of this class a large proton of our time was spent on learning how the Vex robotics kit worked by building a robot from the manual. We were paired up into groups of three to five and set out to use our communication and interpersonal skills to work to gather to create the perfect machine. And then once it's complete there is almost always something wrong with it, so we have to use critical thinking to figure out what's not quite right. After all of that's done we got to test and modify our design.
For the most part, the pride I feel when I look back at this project is just because something I helped build actually worked. It's just really nice to drive it around and see the fruits of my labor.
While I worked on this project a lot of things went wrong with the robot and I had to work on my critical thinking to fix them. For example: the claw wasn't working correctly, so I had to methodically check everything that had to do with how the claw operates. This includes and is not limited to: connection from the brain to the motors, problems with the controller, low battery charge, a broken motor, the gears within the claw not working correctly, and a not powerful enough motor. Doing all of this helped me to improve the way I approach problems. That being said, I think the part of this project that I had the largest difficulty was bug fixes.
If I could start over and change one thing, I wouldn't really change anything. I genuinely feel that I did this project to the best of my ability.
The only time I have really ever done robotics in school was during my fifth grade year. This project in particular gave me some basic knowledge that the current project is now building on.
I hope to get my masters degree in mechanical engineering and any and all knowledge that I have picked up in high school is going to help me greatly. Including working on things like gear ratios and power consumption on a small robot.
For the most part, the pride I feel when I look back at this project is just because something I helped build actually worked. It's just really nice to drive it around and see the fruits of my labor.
While I worked on this project a lot of things went wrong with the robot and I had to work on my critical thinking to fix them. For example: the claw wasn't working correctly, so I had to methodically check everything that had to do with how the claw operates. This includes and is not limited to: connection from the brain to the motors, problems with the controller, low battery charge, a broken motor, the gears within the claw not working correctly, and a not powerful enough motor. Doing all of this helped me to improve the way I approach problems. That being said, I think the part of this project that I had the largest difficulty was bug fixes.
If I could start over and change one thing, I wouldn't really change anything. I genuinely feel that I did this project to the best of my ability.
The only time I have really ever done robotics in school was during my fifth grade year. This project in particular gave me some basic knowledge that the current project is now building on.
I hope to get my masters degree in mechanical engineering and any and all knowledge that I have picked up in high school is going to help me greatly. Including working on things like gear ratios and power consumption on a small robot.