Robot Art Show

Description of what we did:

1. Circuits- We got to design our own circuit diagram with arduino boards, LEDs, wires, batteries, and whatever else we felt like adding to it. This is how we made the robot art show design.
2. Electronics experiments- We did experiments with batteries, paper clips, nails, and insulated copper wire to create an electromagnet that we used to pick up other metals. Doing these electronics experiments helped us fill out our electromagnet lab writeup and teach us about electromagnets in general.
3. Programming- We got to program and code our own circuit to make it do something of our liking. We used programming in our robot art show!

Content:

• Coulomb's Law- a law stating that the force of attraction/repulsion between 2 static charges is proportional to their charges and inverse to the square of the distance between them (F = kq1q2/r^2).
• Series Circuit- a circuit with a single path and multiple components, one after another, all on the same path (rtotal = r1 +r2 +r3 + .....).
• Parallel Circuit- a circuit with branches each with seperate paths for flow of charge/electrons (look for choice of "path") (1/rtotal = 1/r1 + 1/r2 + 1/r3 + .....).
• Ohm's Law- a law stating that electric current is proportional to voltage and inversely proportional to resistance (V = ir).
• Programming- the process of creating a set of instructions that tell a computer how to perform a task.
• My Takeaways- i learned that you have to be patient with your work, practice makes perfect, messing up is okay, and trying new things/experimenting with things is the best way to go.
• Electromagnets- these are magnets that run on electricity. Unlike permanent magnets, the strength of electromagnets can actually be changed. Changing the amount of electric current that flows through it determines the strength and weakness of the magnet.

Reflection:

This was our very first project that wasn't in partners, and it was terrible. I didn't realize how much I loved group projects until quarantine started and everything had to be independent. This project was very hard for me because I had no one to talk to about it, I had no one to ask questions to, and I had no one to help me out with what I needed help on. I also found out that coding and programming is DEFINITELY nit my strong suit. It is very fun to see your final product and your coding work, but it is not fun during the process. I had so many questions and barely knew how to do any of it, so that was really tough for me. But once I finally understood things and was able to put them all together, it was a pretty decent project.

During this project, I would say I definitely improved my critical thinking. Since there was no one to help me, I had to think a lot on my own and test out a bunch of different things to see if any of them would work. Then I had to piece together all of my findings and see if they fit together nicely and worked well. Along with good critical thinking, I also did pretty well with communication. Although I didn't have to communicate much with anyone, there were times where I had really serious questions that I wasn't able to figure out myself. For those questions, I was able to use my communication skills to reach out to my friends and ask them for a little help. So for this project, I did good with communicating when I needed to and my critical thinking skills were much better than usual.

Even though I did well in those categories, I definitely could've improved on my conscientious learning skills because I did not do good with time management this project. We were given a week long extension for our robot art show, so I figured I had plenty of time to do it before the friday it was due. Except I ended up starting it the day before it was due and turning it in close to the deadline time. So I could have been better with those skills for sure. I also could've been better with my collaboration skills since I didn't have a team. I wasn't able to collaborate with anyone for this project and it was kind of boring. But since I didn't have a team to work with, that is the reason why my collaboration skills weren't too great.