PartyBot.. Project 1

On Friday 12th March 2010 we were given a new project to complete. We needed to:

- Create a drawing visualisation machine and produce 3 drawings from it.

We (Christine, Sonny, Nick, Charlotte A, Theresa, Ricki, Daniel and I) all began discussing our ideas and brainstorming on Friday afternoon and came up with 1 main idea which we all seemed to like.

Monday 15th March 2010:

We began developing and constructing the idea further until we came up with a final solution. We decided upon having a robot controlling a remote controlled car which was controlled by sound, and having a robot on top of the remote control car which controlled the different medias that would create the drawings, which would be controlled by flashing light. We then began constructing. As we constructed the idea of having a theme came up where we decided to have a "party" theme, which then resulted in the robot having a name "The PartyBot".

Tuesday 16th March 2010:

The Day began with everyone meeting at Mag Warehouse at St Johns to begin our project of creating a drawing visualisation machine that would create a peice of art. During the day we ran into several problems such as the canvas being a black colour, which meant having to change the vivid marker to a paint tube to allow the media to be seen on the canvas. We also had problems with the robot on the remote controlled car, as it would not squeeze the paint tubes. We had to thin the paint down with water in order to get the paint out of the tube while the remote control car was in action. We also decided to have 1 canvas and have 3 layers on it to show the relationship between the different songs.

Overall I thought this project was good, I enjoyed working with my team. I enjoyed the day out getting our drawing machines to create art. I wouldnt be in any mad rush to create a robot in future though because I haven't played with lego as a kid, i didnt really know what I was doing, and found that creating a stand for our remote control car took alot longer than what i expected it to..

The First Week..

The first week of the BCT program went incredibly quick.

We began the year with a series of three one-day excercises. They were Social Mapping (Tuesday), Data Visualisation (Wednesday) and Situation Shuffle (Thursday).

On Tuesday we were all told to get into groups of 12, and were then asked a series of personal questions in which we were to answer on a post it note and stick up on the wall near our names which were also on post it notes on the wall. We then linked answers with other people to see the similarities we each had with other people.

We then presented our data on a program called Gephi which I found quite challenging to use as I had never used it before, however after asking James a few questions it all began making sense.

On Wednesday we were then given a new task, Data Visualisation. We were to get into groups again this time of 3-4 people. Sonny, Versha and I were to come up with data to collect. So we came up with counting the number of smokers on Queen Street at 12.45pm, 1.45pm and 2.45pm. We were then to present this data visually to present to class on Thursday morning.

On Thursday we were given a new task, Situation Shuffle which I enjoyed. We were to get into groups of four and follow a set of instructions that we were given. There were four roles.

1 - Actuator

2 - Controller

3 - Tracker

4 - Sensor

This activity was challenging as several of the same cards came after the other such as ROTATE 180 degrees. As this card occured twice we were led into a Hawkins construction wall which made the experience a little more challenging as we could not move foward. We then presented a slideshow of our journey on Friday morning to the class.

Overall I thought the week was great. I didnt get what we were doing at first, however its slowly becoming clearer in my head.