Use a semester to dedicate all of your class time to one large project. In my case, Robotics

I chose to spend all of my time working on our robot as the leader of the robotics team here.We built by far the best robot we have ever built and laid some groundwork for a team to grow in the future. Our robot, “Robotomy” was a hefty 120lb 12 gauge steel intake shooter based on the Cranberry Alarm Ri3D. While it was the best robot in my opinion, it did have its own problems. There were significant wiring and programming issues as we experimented with mecanum drive for the first time ever.

The team we built also was a huge accomplishment. While there are not a lot of returning members next year, there are outside connections with new sponsors and mentors that will help to regrow the team next year under Orren Wolchok’s leadership. We organized and fully thought out our robot room and designed a pit that can be conducive to a productive team at competitions.

 What did you like most about this project?
     - This was a favorite project for me, I love our robotics team and really enjoyed being able to support it through class time and my assignments. 

 What did you like least about this project?
     - I really think this project was one of the best I have gotten to work on. It did not really have a huge con because it was doing what I wanted to do all day anyway. One issue was the lack of a larger group. It was really just me and Orren set working on this project daily and I think a bigger group during the day would have helped or more knowledgeable people working with tools. 

 How successful do you think this project was? 
     - I think this project was supper successful and was able to achieve even more than we set out to do. We may not have made it to state but we set a new baseline for what an Steel Talons robot should look like. We also grew relationships with the community and brought in enough funding and framework that next year should have an easier time that us to build even better. I cannot wait to see what the future teams build. 

 What are you most proud of in terms of the project, as a whole?
     - I was most proud of the mechanism and the sponsors that we grew relationships with. They were able to help us not only afford but design the intake and shooter. 

 What were the biggest challenges you faced?
     - We faced a lot of challenges with electrical problems on our robot. At competition our driver, who already did not have a lot of experience on this years robot had to deal with drive train failures and random communication problems. Back home we had problems with tools breaking and the actual cost of such a big project, we solved those through relationships with local manufacturing firms who sponsored us and helped with harder to build parts. 

 If you could have done something differently, what would it be?
     - I think one thing not as connected to the project but still robotics related would have been getting our driver some more time to practice. If our driver had a better knowledge of the random quirks or our programmers had more time to fix them we could have gone to state or won a blue banner. 

Build a glider using 3 or more materials. It needs to involve using the laser engraver on cardboard or wood.

We learned about some basic aerospace engineering concepts. Airfoils were the main focus, we had to learn about them and model them in onShape but were not required to build the glider using that info. We learned to use Adobe Illustrator for the laser to draw vectors and cut using them.

My build was terrible, it wasn’t very functional and fell apart every time I threw it. It did not travel very far and kind of just fell. I did learn that it is harder to make a glider than just making a few light wings and slapping a handle to throw it. I needed in the end to actually spend some time on it and design a good glider.

How can we protect and preserve our land, water, and space environments for a sustainable future?

This was more of a theoretical project than others. We learned more about what is wrong and thought through what could be done with our planet more than we really actually built a solution. The Engineering project was competing against each other as a part of a game of our choice. I chose to play the “space” game where we had the task of knocking everything “out of the atmosphere” (off a table).

My actual build was a large spinning arm that spread over the table and knocked everything off then when reversed folded back up into a smaller area. This is similar to how a satellite might deploy solar sails for power or its sensors. I was able to successfully clear the table even if I burnt through 4 or 5 vex motors to test it. I built a large gearbox to get the arms spinning up to a high rpm quickly because it really did not need an insane amount of torque to get going.