Update - End of Week 1

Last Friday, we had a guest speaker, Ryan Kastner (former Cluster 1 faculty). He shared some of the work that Explorers for Engineering (E4E) is doing. Ryan and Curt (our faculty) are also co-directors of E4E. Any misconception that computer scientists and engineers just sit in a lab in front of a computer was smashed when he shared with us their work which took them to places like nature reserves, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic – just to name a few. They went to Guatemala to map out ancient Mayan tombs and create 3-D models of it. They will soon 3-D print these models and share them. Another fascinating project he shared was a “camera trap” to get pictures of animals in their natural habitat. There are challenges that they face in putting a camera out in the wild such as power. The devices can’t be plugged in and re-charging them frequently is unreasonable. The camera traps turn on when it “sees” an animal and continue to track its movements. We ended last week in lab presenting our AppInventor apps. Our presentations and demos will be available this weekend on our blog. Games such as Ghost Run and Dory Dash were made, as well as painting-based apps. Arlete and Steven were recognized by both the faculty and students for their “You Draw, I guess” app. Additionally, Xiaofei and Savannah were the People’s Choice Runner-Up for their “My Paint” app. Late Friday afternoon we began working on our Scribbler RoboArt projects. We quickly became engrossed in making our designs perfect but learned that they didn’t always behave the way we thought they would. We discovered that the battery strength sometimes played a role in the execution as did the surface our Scribblers drove on including securing the paper to the surface. We learned to adapt and become comfortable with Python (the language we program our Scribblers with). We presented our final RoboArt designs in the afternoon. Our demos from can be found on our blog by Sunday, July 24. Congratulations to Sarah and Xiaofei for the Faculty Choice award for having their Scribbler write out “Cluster One Rules”! Additionally, congratulations to Annie and Arjun for the People’s Choice Award for their Nike logo design!