1. My project is a short term memory snake-like game that required an immense amount of effort to create. The soldering was fairly easy, but it was tedious since there were so many connections. Programming took almost all the focus. The way that I soldered might have been efficient for me in the beginning, but I soon ran into problems with coding very quickly. Mr. Smith helped during the coding process and filled me in on any knowledge I lacked. The one who really brought the code together was Rosa. She created an equation to help me with the struggles of movement on my LED light strips. Some of the feedback I received was, "a cool idea, but there is a long way to go before it is a game." I completely agree with that comment as well. I have come a very long way, but there is still so much that I still need to code for. Right now a maze pops up that you need to remember, and you can use the joystick to move through to make the maze, but there is no way for me to score it, which doesn't really make it a game. That is something I should focus on over the summer if I have the opportunity. 

2. If I had another month to work on the project, I am certain it would be as great as Pac-Man (not really). I could work on the scoring system and the accuracy test and the rest of the physical needs. I could make it an arcade machine and paint it. I would make it a true game. 

3. The hardest thing about my project was the movement command to "go down". This was extremely hard because the way I wired my LED strips were side-to-side. This created a problem that If I wanted to move straight down, I wouldn't just move down 1 or to the side 12, we had to create a formula that worked to go from, say 11-23 and 4-19 and 7-16. If you look there is no easy way to get one simple number to solve this. Fortunately for me, Rosa was in the innovation lab for a few periods and decided to help me with my struggles. She created a perfect equation that works every single time, so without her, my project would have been way behind schedule or I might have not even found a way to "move down".

4. The most important thing that I learned to do was to keep looking at the same thig a different way. Perspective changes everything. If I didn't see the solution right in front of my face, I needed to change the way I looked at the situation and almost every time by the 3rd time I changed my POV, I found a way. I was trying to work on the "up" function, but was running into the same problems as the "down" function. By some time I eventually thought, "Instead of going up, why don't I move up 2 and then go down once. This was a breakthrough in my mind because I was utilizing a function that already existed instead of making a new one. Overall my project was a big struggle, but somehow I got through it. In my mind, it was a  huge success and I am extremely happy with the way everything came out. It's not finished, but I am still very proud. 

Thesis: We are making sensory boards for High Horses to help with occupational therapy. Our goal is to make a sensory board to help someone open a bottle cap. We have different sized caps with different handles on the top to help them open it, they can start on the easiest one and work their way down to the hardest one. Inside the bottles will be a prize like a candy or toy so they will want to open it.

Feedback: Some feedback that we got was that we should add more color to make it more interesting and inviting, we also need to add directions so people know what they need to do.

Next Steps: Our next steps are to laser cut directions into it so people know what they need to do, paint the bottles and caps to make it more interesting, and connect the caps and strings to the board so they don't fall off. 

Prompt: The prompt for this quarter's IDEA class was to create a musical intervention. The musical invention would be placed in the front walkway to draw people up the walkway and into the building. It would represent our school as innovative and interesting to visitors and passersby. Our group chose to address this prompt by making a ceiling xylophone that would be operated by pulling down cranks to hit certain notes. The reason for the notes on the ceiling was to keep the pipes out of dangers way such as weather or people. In the rest of this post I will go into deeper detail of the project.

Precedents: Our final product closely resembles the Cornell Chimes. The hitting system is very similar to this wonderfully simple music machine. A link to the Cornell Chimes is here .

Description of Final Project/Intervention: The intervention is a ceiling xylophone. The xylophone included many things that make it stand out from any other xylophone such as a crank system and a resetting hitter system. The cranks are placed six inches apart so they are far enough that two people can play them but not far enough that one person cannot play two. The self resetting system is a rubber band attracted to the hitter  so after the hitter hits the ceiling it is pulled back down to it's original position. The rubber band is made out of a flexible rubber that our coach, Max Vanatta, bought us.

Challenges: One of the challenges that came on later on in our project is the hammer length. As our project moved on we realized that we might need a different hammer length for each key but than Will came up with a brilliant idea. We had to measure the middle of the longest pipe and then we could center all the other pipes around the longest one.

How to play our Final Project: The way to play the ceiling xylophone is simple, just pull the correct lever for the desired note and the hitter will hit the correct note.

Next Steps: After all this explanation, my group has not finished our project. We still need to hang the pipes on the ceiling and drills holes into the brick wall to attract the hitting mechanism to the wall. We also need to attract the bungee cords to the hitting mechanism so everything can reset. And finally, we need to test and make sure everything works and then we will finally be finished.

Link for Video for the 4: https://youtu.be/p7jEMdKbnAU

“Music is such a communal activity… but we tend to leave it in the hands of the expert.” —Linsey Pollak.

In this studio, we will develop interactive communal objects through the topic of music. Students will begin by exploring the different ways in which we can interact with music and how we as a class can create it within our own classroom community. Music will be considered a type of playful communication, and students will physically investigate sound-making techniques and materials as a scientific art.  Through the creation of unique musical instruments of their own design, students will discover what makes material into sound and sound into music.  Further they will address how to best share this joyful experience with the world through installing their work here at the school.

How do we make music, not just noise? How does a sound producing object invite the user to interact with it? How does a new user learn to make sounds or play music using this instrument?  What makes this activity communal?  Students will explore these questions through exercises in brainstorming, sketching, and prototyping. Ultimately we will use these skills and prototypes to develop new musical objects for our community at the classroom scale and the school scale.

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Click the above link to see our prototype in action!

Our Prompt: For this quarter-long idea session, we were tasked with the challenge of creating a musical installation somewhere along the walkway to the school entrance. This installation would have to entice students, teachers, and passersby alike to take the long trek down the walkway and would be able to be played either solo, or as a group effort. 

Our Project: After considering the prompt, we decided to address it by creating a xylophone fixed to the ceiling of the walkway, with a unique activation system. We debated attaching the xylophone to a wall, but we realized it would be best to keep it out of reach of people with bad intentions. The activation system is a collection of levers and hammers. The hammers hover below the chimes, and when a lever is pulled down, it tugs on a cable which is attached to the hammer above. The cable is fixed to the hammer on the opposite side of the fulcrum, meaning when the lever is pulled the hammer swings upwards, hitting the note. We have had several iterations of this. The first was the idea of a pulley system that dragged a hammer up a track. We were fairly satisfied with this idea, but we soon realized there was a way we could do the same thing in a simpler fashion (our current system).

Precedents: Our activation system closely resembles the Cornell Chimes. We took inspiration from the brilliantly simple way these chimes work and modified the system to meet our needs. 

Challenges/lessons learned: One thing we didn't account for was the lengths of the levers in relation to the lengths of the chimes. We needed the levers to hit the pipe in the exact middle, which we originally thought meant we would have to create a different length lever for each pipe. Eventually we realized we could stagger the pipes, lining up all of the centerpoints, eliminating this problem. Another overall lesson I learned was that prototyping and iterations are key. We were certain we had our final idea when we came up with the idea of a pulley system, but there is almost always a better way (for us it was the lever system). Also, when we had all of our final pieces in rhino, we decided it would be a good idea to cut just one lever/hammer combo first to see if it worked. We were lucky we did this because we discovered some problems we had to fix.

Next Steps/Iterations: Although we have worked long and hard at this project for the past quarter, we are far from done. Our activation system is complete, but we still need to figure out how to fix the chimes/notes to the ceiling. In addition, the final project would ideally be placed where it was originally meant to go (the walkway). I personally would also like to eventually change some small things like the shape of the levers (a more comfortable, aesthetically pleasing version would be nice), and add caps over the boxes holding the levers so you can only see the lever (this would give it a cleaner, simpler look). 

Monkey bars, a slide, maybe a merry-go-round.  We will always love these trusty staleworts of the park, but now, more than ever, the scope and complexity of new kinds of structures is challenging the way we think about play. Designers and innovators are creating structures that go far beyond swings, encouraging users of different ages and abilities to customize their play experiences through experimentation and exploration. For many people, the fun lies in finding your physical limits; but what if once you reached those limits, the play structure adapted to a greater degree of difficulty? Research groups, such as Human Computer Interaction Engineering at MIT, are exploring how objects designed for play can adapt to help with skill building.  Questions like “how high can you go?” or “how long can you hang on?” turn into “can you go higher?” or “can you hang on longer?”

In this studio, students will look beyond the typical playground to design structures that can engage the full spectrum of possible users and integrate the thrill of adventure into the everyday.  In collaboration with students at Karam House in Reyhanli, Turkey, we will prototype play objects that can be installed within an existing timber-framed playground structure.  Student teams will be in direct contact with corresponding teams at Karam House throughout the entire design process through weekly virtual meetings.  In the first phase of the studio, students will create scale models of their prototypes; after midterm, teams will consolidate, and a select number of designs from both Karam and Woodstock will be built in full scale at each location.