This beautiful mess was the flagship project of my engineering class. A team of three students were selected to design and program a “claw-bot” and I had the privilege to be one of the three in my class. This project would be presented in a competition among the different schools in our area in which we were to define and implement the design process in front of a panel of judges who were professional engineers. This “claw-bot” took roughly one month of careful engineering in which my team constructed, programmed, tested, and redesigned the mechanism. It required us to apply everything that we have learned in the past three years of our high school engineering program into one final “masterpiece.”
The end product of the “claw-bot” was a remote controlled, wireless vehicle with a live stream camera feed attached to it. Our team considered this to be our greatest achievement at the time, for we had never done anything to this magnitude. I was unequivocally challenged at every hour I spent working on this, for every solution to a problem would provide more problems. The end result was still faulty, but we were under a time constraint, and we were presenting the design process more so than we were presenting the “claw-bot.” We never got to go back and perfect the “claw-bot,” but we left it for future classes to work on and stress out over. It would be our legacy in our high school engineering program.
Throughout the entire process of creating the “claw-bot,” I learned many valuable lessons. For one, I learned what it actually meant to work in a team. There was no way that I would have been able to construct this alone. My knowledge in programming is quite lacking, and my ideas would only fulfill portions of the design. My teammates had their own flaws as well, but we all balanced each other out as a whole. Before this project, I was always an independent worker. I learned that I can not be a lone wolf if I intend on succeeding in the field of engineering.
My laptop has carried me throughout my first semester of college. I would typically spend about five hours each day in front of the computer doing classwork or entertaining myself. This was purchased one week before I moved in to the Ohio State University to start my college career. My parents bought this for me as one last send-off gift and I could not be thankful enough. I quickly began to realize that this laptop would become the center of my education. How well I would do in class partially depended on how well I used my laptop. Every homework assignment that I have done so far involves the use of my laptop. If I did not have this device, I would be forced to spend most of my time at a computer lab. This would most likely cause a lot of unnecessary stress and a plummet in my work ethic. I will shamelessly admit that my world currently revolves around my HP Pavilion laptop.