Questions:
1)How did you use the design cycle in your testing and refinement?
While building the pet feeder, my partner and I found the design cycle really useful. It was the way we naturally did things when a problem occurred. Although we would sometimes skip a part called “feedback” , we were still able to improve our design.
2)Evaluate the effectiveness of your model.
We can not calculate the effectiveness of our model.The type of energy being used in the pet feeder is chemical energy. The chemical energy is coming from a battery. When the energy goes to the clock motor, the motor moves resulting in the board moving.
3)What did you learn about your machine that was “deeper or more effective learning while developing your model?
Although having the correct blue print was important, through out the project I learned that researching was actually the most important thing. Researching helped us in many ways. The way it helped us the most was when we had to decide the amount of dividers to put down. If we did not research, we would be stuck on a step, resulting in an incomplete project.
4)If you had the chance to do this project again, what would you do differently?
If my partner and I had to do the project again, I would make sure that we had a tin that was large enough for heads of all sizes. As I said before, I believe that the sections of the pet feeder are too small for a pet’s head to fit. Another thing my group would do differently would be handling the materials with a lot of care. Throughout the project, my partner and I experienced a lot of parts breaking apart. When the materials broke apart, it resulted in spending more time to fix the part rather than completing the project.
5)Discuss how this project helped you better understand the meaning and importance of creativity, resilience and collaboration for success.
Creativity was a key part in creating the project. If we did not have creativity, we would not get a ME for the ideas grade on our rubric. When the project was introduced to us, we had two options. The first option was to take something and make it better. The second option was to invent something new. Both of those options required creativity because you had to think of new things. For PBL project, we had about two weeks to build it. At first, it sounded like a long time, but when we started building, it went by quickly. Because of a time limit, we had to have resilience. When a problem occurred, we had to quickly think of an alternative or else we would not be able to finish on time. Not only creativity and resilience was important, collaboration was also crucial. In the beginning of the project, only one of the two of us would be working. The other one of us would be watching the stuff that was going on. But like I said before, we were limited by time .Quickly, We found out that we had to divide and conquer in order to finish the project on time.
