Overview

How can one magnify the power of a small power source and motor to lift a heavy weight?  What are some strategies to make mechanisms more efficient? What communication strategies, tools and processes do virtual teams need to design, communicate and build efficient machines with limited equipment, tools and resupply issues?

Design and construct a crane that will automatically lift an object weighing approximately 5 lbs and place it on a truss bridge.  

Materials Provided:
- Mini Vex Build Kit
- Up to four 1.5 Volt Batteries
- Two VEX Motors
- Two Breadboards
- One Pandemic
- Zoom Breakout Rooms

Project Initiation

The Honor's Crane projects began the first week of our school's accelerated 9 week schedule with a Design Brief, summarizing the project and objectives, and a video, highlighting the importance of crane operations to our economy in the Port of Los Angeles.  This project served as the practical application for all theoretical learning with all the technical, logistical and communications challenges of building a single prototype as a group project using 3-5 individual mini-VEX kits.

Project Exploration and Development

Students learned mechanisms, electricity, motor efficiency, structures and machine control in this project.  More importantly, they learned teamwork  and communication in a remote environment,  logistics coordination to obtain needed parts, and adaptability, innovation and tenacity to overcome obstacles and find solutions that could and did safely work to allow the teams to solve the problem. Student learned trouble shooting, project documentation, technical writing and virtual team skills, including video editing and displaying their project virtually.

Project Revision and Exhibition

Students met in teams daily and were charged with documenting their ideas, decisions, designs, and progress daily.  Individual ideas and prototypes were shared, reviewed and evaluated by the teams.  This information was used to plan improvements, request additional parts and to exchange parts as needed so that the complete prototype could be built, tested and presented. Troubleshoot and revision created working final projects that were displayed on a class webpage.

Teachers and Subjects

Patricia Samora - Principals of Engineering