Truss Bridges

In this building challenge, we built a truss that could withstand the most weight. We had one day to build our truss. It was built out of balsa wood and wood glue. We spent one more day adding the green paper. These are called truss connectors. Over these two days, I developed a design that worked by doubling the thickness of the wood. I was experienced in cutting the wood and putting parts together because of my previous experience. In middle school, I was in science olympiad. We worked on building many things out of wood. We built windmills to generate energy, planes, and towers. Through all this, I learned how to cut balsa wood well and how to put it together. This helped me to do well. Overall, I got first place. My design did far better than most of the other builds. In this challenge, I learned more about wood glue because I only used super glue in middle school. This was a fun challenge and helped me learn more about trusses.

Atlas Stone Day 8

Overall, this was a fun project and I learned a lot. This was the hardest NXT challenge by far but the challenge made it fun. I learned a lot about how to code the NXT robots. I would say that I enjoyed java more than this. This code was very different to me and the concepts were different. I had a good partner which I was lucky to get. He was very smart and we worked very well together. This project was very time consuming and we even had to work outside of class to finish. My partner finished the project at the end by showing the teacher our video.

Atlas Stone Day 7

On the final day, we barely did not finish. We got the last part of the code added so that it could get all the way to the third weight and back. The code was working but we could not get the whole thing to run all together. We got every part to work in different pieces. We eventually got the whole project to work but not by the deadline day. It was hard to make lots of tweaks because there were so many people testing so we had to wait in a super long line everytime we tested. This caused the process to take a lot longer than it should have.

Atlas Stone Day 6

When we began more testing, it was working fine. For some reason, all the trials started going wrong all of a sudden. They would not turn enough or it would turn to much. We also had a problem where it would not follow the lines. After, some more testing, we figured out the code we put in that had caused all of the problems. We had successful attempts as far as we wanted it to go. We had only coded up to when it would drop off the second weight so moree problems occured when adding on the code to drop the last weight. Overall, it was a good work day and we made lots of progress.

Atlas Stone Day 5

Today was another day of coding. We had to do more research to get everything we wanted. It took a while but we eventually figured all of the code out. We had to start testing so that we could make slight changes to our code. We had to account for the fact that the turning with the weight was very different than the turn without it. We added a motor at the top so that we could pull up the weight. This was done by added a bar for the weight to hold on to as we pulled it up.