Classroom

Classroom Norms

The project in its early development stages looked drastically different from its final product. Our website and trifold especially took lots of adjustments to develop its final theme. Through consistent work ethic and excessive trial and error, we were able to finally create a thematic final look for our presentation and perfect the execution of our product.

Our team put a lot of emphasis on our presentation, maximizing the professionality of our showcase while representing our company. For this task, we focused on various assets that would enable our company to stand out, developing shirts and nametags. The shirt design process was demanding: our marketing team created a variety of shirt designs and color schemes and sent out a survey to dozens of students, compiling the results to decide on our final design. After choosing the design, we finalized our dimensions and imported the design into our Cricut printing machine, a process which took days on its own. Once all the cut designs were extracted, we heat pressed them onto shirts (size information was gathered from another survey and bought in bulk), finally delivering the final products to their owners along with personalized nametags. The trifold began development after the rest of our project was finalized and the information was ready to be compiled into our presentation. This was a combined effort from the entirety of our project team.

We were assigned this project to alpha test a new curriculum for PLTW in order to determine if it could become an educational course and be offered across the United States. We were able to work together as a class, splitting up tasks since we had to apply a real world problem to the vex model. We already had prior knowledge of programming and collaboration going into this, but we were able to better refine these skills as we progressed through this project. Yet when it comes to testing new items for VEX, we have never done anything like this before. We would have liked to go into this project with working templates for the code, as it would have definitely helped speed up the process, and additional help with coding basics would have been helpful as not everyone took a coding class. 

We first worked in 4 teams, building our individual robots and testing them while writing the code. We were able to successfully create a system that has the arm picking up objects along with sorting with color. We wanted to expand this process by using an AI sensor to sort the cylinder based on a tag they have and we use the AI sensor to also detect the boxes and use the arm to pick them up. We managed to get the arm to detect the boxes and we also were able to sort the cylinders based on their April tags. However, We ran into multiple challenges such as AI sensors failing to detect due to high conveyor velocities and we had to adjust the sensor accordingly. We also had to adjust timings with pneumatics to ensure the cylinders go accordingly.

Outside of this project, we can apply this course by building automated systems that organize and distribute school supplies like pencils, glue, and paper. Using conveyor belts, sensors, and robotic arms, schools could sort materials faster and reduce the workload for teachers and staff while staying better organized and prepared. This system could also be adjusted for different grades or classes and help reduce waste by improving inventory tracking. The pathway can also connect to coding by letting students program these systems, building skills in engineering, robotics, and computer science for future careers.