Initial very rough prototype to see if our track idea would work.
It
did work fairly well, especially given that legos don't make for a
smooth ride |
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| Liz testing a popsicle stick attached to a car. |
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| We eventually had to scrap the 'puppets on sticks' idea because of the
force on the sticks from the board would cause the vehicle to stall out
or knock itself over. We tried a variety of things, including various gearings,
books to lift up the cars so they wouldn't be so far below the cardboard,
etc. But no luck. We ended up using a track on the bottom level, and magnets
to connect the girls to their respective cars. Robbie Berg gets credit
for giving us the magnets. Thanks! |
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| Kara with turn cars - with swively things - this was our next major design
iteration - a constant curvature for the board path and cars with axles
set to this curvature. This way the cars would follow the track with a
minimum of hitting the board itself. |
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| This is the initial mechanism for the professor so he will be able to bounce up and down during (and at the end) of the game. Eventually we added a second motor to the same mechanism so that both handyboards/characters could trigger the professor - we had found that when just cobbling the connectors together as seemed reasonable, caused one Handyboard to influence the other in surprising ways (turning it on, starting other motors, etc) |
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| Proto spider (foreground) and proto squirrel (background) |
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| Does use differential gearing, intended for track.This way it can handle the twists and turns of the path better without stalling out. |
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From L to R: one of the girls' cars, the professor and his stand,
and the two girls. And some silly string. .
On the car there
are some lego weights. Later, heavier weights were needed so that the
strong magnets wouldn't lift cars out of the track. |
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| Liz's beautiful arm drawing the black marks that the reflectance sensor uses to determine where the squares are on the board above. |
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| A tired Liz recreating the academic quad - well the whole campus actually - with her amazing art skills. |
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| Partially completed board on top with some of the mechanism in place underneath. |
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A more fully completed board. In the upper left is the spider's home
(Tower), and to the right is the squirrel's home (a tree). The sides of
the boards was decorated with pictures of Wellesley.
One handyboard can be seen peeking through. The 'buttons' (white and
blue, sticking up) were on top of the touch sensors, though they didn't
always work quite right. People tended to be too harsh on them. |
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