Happy Summer

And this concludes the year. Cheers, and a happy summer.

Ending Remarks - Arvin

This is it. The final days of this school year. My feelings towards this are...strange...definitely calmer than when I started. This has definitely quite a year for me. 

I can say for a fact is, that this class was the class among the chaos, pressures, and anxieties of all my courses was the one that I can really say that I legitimately enjoyed. I know that during some days doing the work, especially everything related with the robots (not so much Mastercam...ugh), practically made me stay sane. Although I could write on forever, unfortunately due to the sake of time I have to conclude this.

(I'll work on this later)

Ending Remarks - Ayla

Well, this is the end of a year that was interesting to say the least. I can't say that I know everyone in here (I know almost no one, actually), but people have all been super nice, and it's going to be a shame to leave this class hour.

The last two days of class we've had the box checks, and while it kind of felt like we were getting tried for a crime, it was an interesting and learning experience.

First, it's great to know that even though we were doing Tetrix and didn't really need to interact with anyone else, most of the other people still thought we're decent and a good enough group to have interacted with.

I personally learned some interesting things through the checks/trials. For one, teamwork is super important, even with a competitive spirit. Even though I sort of knew this, I still think that I managed to learn more about it in the last few days. While everyone else was going up and being tried, opinions were asked about them. While many complaints were put in, almost all of them were fair points, not out of spite or rudeness. And as many cons to the groups there were, there were also quite a few complements about them: what good people the team were, how helpful, etc. It's great that even though we've all been competing in tug-of-war for the last week or so that nice things can still be said.

To be completely honest, I still don't fully understand robots. Like, I get the general idea, but I don't see entirely how they work, or what each of the pieces do, or a lot of things that I probably should have learned but didn't this year. In the last few days, I started to realize the enormity to not understanding that, and it ended up being pretty for our grade.

At the end of it all, I learned that working in a team is important, and that if you can't work with people, it's not a good thing and basically you're going to end up screwed over in life. I personally dislike the diffusion of responsibility, because I've had a history of having to do everything in a project, and it's just really annoying. But this was pretty fun, and it was fair enough that no one ended up doing too much or too little.

To close off, I want to say that it was great working with Shaina, Arvin, and Philippe, and it was also great branching off to help other people with what they didn't understand or didn't necessarily know how to do.

PS: Shrek the Musical.

Our school put on the production of Shrek the Musical, and wow that was a really fun play. It was great to watch the play, because I knew a lot of the people in it. I totally love the "I Think I Got You Beat" scene, and it was totally fun to watch because of how funny they made it. The sets were so elaborate, and I love that drama is just so good at doing that! (Engineering connection) The towers on the side of the stage went up basically overnight, and I just think it's remarkable that they held people without breaking. I saw what they were made of: basic sheets of plywood, nails, beams, and paint. I think that the crew has done it so long it's second nature, but I still thought it was cool they were bale to make all the sets so fast.

Ending Remarks - Shaina

This year our group had a series of ups and downs. Varying from large arguments about getting graded, to minor discussions about the ratchet-ness of our robot. Although we didn't get to complete all of the challenges I'm still glad I got to meet and get to know each individual in my group. Also, everyone in the group learned a lot weather it be about teamwork, sharing or just listening to someone else's idea. All in all if I had to change anything about how our group worked I would only change the way the work was distributed. Since I attempted to build the robot myself only asking for help when I needed to do things for engineering club. Our group did poorly on the challenges. Also Ayla and I attended "Shrek the Musical", Which was a great play that integrated engineering into various parts such as the mechanics of the spotlight and also the platforms that could turn. 

Week 13: Accomplished This Week

Well, this was the last week of robotics. Wow. It's weird to think that we're not going to be with the exact group of people, doing robots, ever again.

We successfully went through all ten runs that we needed, which is fantastic, lemme say xD

We also lost Philippe this week to graduation, since he was a senior and is now gone.

Of the runs, we lost eight out of ten, because we're just that awesome.

Final prepping before going into a run.

Philippe, as he takes his final.

This is Michael. Shaina calls him Snowcone. He's a freshie, and he's helped us out on our robot, like, a whole lot.

Week 13: Goals

The bot is rebuilt! And it's being coded around now! Woo!

Now we're going to compete.

Week 12: Accomplished This Week

So we've given up the idea of the ball challenge (I think). Shaina has trashed our robot (figuratively speaking) and completely remade it (literally speaking). It's going to be a cinderblock.