Robot Art Show
This project was definitely different than all the rest of the other stem projects. It was a lot less building with power saws and drills, but using you brain to make electronics do what you want. Our instructions were to make a robot art show with the supplies given to us. Our supplies were a red board, bread board, wires, resistors, lights, and other interesting objects that would make sounds or control lights. Since very few people in our class had experience with computer coding and breadboards we all started out with a program called Arduino, which was a packet that had activities to make the computer connect to the red board and do different things. For example the first activity was to make a light blink. So we looked at the instructions and we hooked up some wired in a certain order, a resistor, and a light. When we plugged it into the computer the light started blinking. Then we had to go onto the computer and read through the code to get a better understanding of how computer made the light blink. As we went through the packet we had more and more complicated tasks, like lighting up multiple lights or making a buzzer go off. Once we finished the packet we were on our own with designing a light show with our own code.
Key Concepts
Circuit~ a complete loop of conductive material from one end of the power source to another
Current~ measured by Ammeter in Amps, "flow" of electricity
Voltage~ measured by voltmeter in volts "push" of electricity, potential energy difference across a resistor
Ohm's Law~ V=IR (V=voltage, I=current, R=resistance)
Kirchhoff's Law~ the sum of the currents going into a connection must equal the sum of the currents leaving the connection
Voltage Law~ the sum of the voltages around a circuit must be equal to zero
Series~ the total resistance of resistors in series is the sum of the resistors
Parallel~ you can add the resistors in a series to get the total resistance
Resistance~ a measure where a conductor opposes the electrical current
Bread Board~ construction base for prototyping electronics,
Programming~ the process of developing and implementing various sets of instructions to enable a computer to do a certain task
Current~ measured by Ammeter in Amps, "flow" of electricity
Voltage~ measured by voltmeter in volts "push" of electricity, potential energy difference across a resistor
Ohm's Law~ V=IR (V=voltage, I=current, R=resistance)
Kirchhoff's Law~ the sum of the currents going into a connection must equal the sum of the currents leaving the connection
Voltage Law~ the sum of the voltages around a circuit must be equal to zero
Series~ the total resistance of resistors in series is the sum of the resistors
Parallel~ you can add the resistors in a series to get the total resistance
Resistance~ a measure where a conductor opposes the electrical current
Bread Board~ construction base for prototyping electronics,
Programming~ the process of developing and implementing various sets of instructions to enable a computer to do a certain task
Reflection
In this project I felt like there was a LOT to learn and take in. It was very difficult in the beginning trying to conceptualize that a battery can "know" how much energy it needs to push through a circuit for one or more lightbulbs to work. But we just had to work through it, and I felt like we did very well. My partner and I worked together in sync trying to figure out how successfully program a computer. This unit was also very hard because our teacher didn't have too much programing experience, so if we had a question we would have to answer it ourselves and work through not always knowing the right answer. I feel like that's a valuable skill I need to have, because I'm not always going to have a teacher right by my side ready to help me when I'm confused. I also have gained quite a few skills and lots of knowledge about programing a computer.
I think sometimes during this project we would get a little frustrated and give up for a little bit because no one could answer our question, and maybe if we had persevered a little bit longer maybe we could have found an answer. Also we could have reached out to our other classmates instead of just sitting and waiting for our teacher and we could have gotten a lot more done, and possibly made our light show better.
Some peaks from this project were we worked really well together and tried to make sure we both understood the topic, also we set up the bread boards really smoothly which saved us a lot of time. Some pits of the project were it got very frustrating when things wouldn't work and we wouldn't know how to solve the problem. If you accidentally screw in a nail in the wrong place you can just take it out, but with computer programing if you put in to many commas or loops it won't tell you where you went wrong, it will just say it's not working. Which gets very frustrating. I am ebullient about computer programing and even though there were some frustrating parts about it I really hope I can learn more about it someday.
I think sometimes during this project we would get a little frustrated and give up for a little bit because no one could answer our question, and maybe if we had persevered a little bit longer maybe we could have found an answer. Also we could have reached out to our other classmates instead of just sitting and waiting for our teacher and we could have gotten a lot more done, and possibly made our light show better.
Some peaks from this project were we worked really well together and tried to make sure we both understood the topic, also we set up the bread boards really smoothly which saved us a lot of time. Some pits of the project were it got very frustrating when things wouldn't work and we wouldn't know how to solve the problem. If you accidentally screw in a nail in the wrong place you can just take it out, but with computer programing if you put in to many commas or loops it won't tell you where you went wrong, it will just say it's not working. Which gets very frustrating. I am ebullient about computer programing and even though there were some frustrating parts about it I really hope I can learn more about it someday.