Discovery

In this first phase of our design process, we were given two days to "discover" what the project was. While we were provided all the materials, there were still boundaries that we had to meet. Even though we were allowed to laser cut parts, the majority of our creation was based around the available materials in the design studio. In turn, we spent quite a bit of time building with the parts, experimenting with new ideas and noting what seemed to work and what did not. Two ideas we started to develop included an Archimedes screw as well as just random assortments of marble tracks.

Besides building, we also experimented with coding, with our go-to language being RobotC. In class, we worked on a small marble run project, coding a car to catch a falling marble. It was not easy, but we learned a lot about the logic and syntax behind the language which we used in the motors and sensors of our project.

At the conclusion of the two days, we not only learned about tools that would be crucial to our project, but we also generated ideas that would be used later on in both the mini-sculpture and final sculpture.