Their story, in their words…..
The robot was built and programmed in the Arduino software. Although the plans changed multiple times during the build, in the end the robot turned out great! Initially, without much experience in programming, we attempted to create a path of tape which the robot would follow. The purpose of this robot was to detect a set path using a color sensor, and carry things on top of it detected by a pressure plate. However, being almost done with the project the color sensor short circuited and broke, so we had to innovate. As a result, a new program was written where the robot would detect empty space and move towards it. The logistics of it were quite difficult, but in the end the robot would scan 80° both right and left using an ultrasound, and figure out the furthest distance in a direction it would then take.
The challenging part about the robot was definitely the code. Having spent hours on it we were all exhausted at certain times, but we kept persevering. Moreover, most of us being experienced in Python, it was a new experience to code in C++. The code we wrote would then need to be adapted multiple times and debugged for this specific language. On the other hand, the good part about having the experience is the general understanding of how coding works, meaning it wasn’t difficult to figure out what exactly we needed to include in the code. We were able to distribute different tasks amongst each other in order to improve efficiency which helped us in the long run. Sam and Federica did the programming while Mohammed built the physical robot, all excelling at our own tasks.
Despite the many challenges faced, as a group we managed to stick together and contribute to the best of our abilities to the project. The feeling of having accomplished such a great result, despite some times of uncertainty due to inexperience, is definitely worth all the effort. We believe that the most valuable skill we developed throughout the whole project is definitely mastering teamwork and communication. The problem a team might face when trying to deal with something ‘’big’’ and quite challenging is, in fact, division: members might go off tangents, not communicating ideas properly and trying to impose thoughts and ideas rather than develop a group strategy in which each member can contribute productively to the final product.
Despite some discussions, we managed to tackle this issue by dividing tasks but never working on those separately- so that we would still maintain an element of cooperation. We also relied massively on efficient communication: whenever one of us felt uncomfortable or distressed we would talk about it trying to restore dynamics that would work for the three of us. We can all agree that what made this project so valuable goes beyond our new developed critical thinking and coding skills; it’s been a journey of personal growth that shone a light on our individual strengths and weaknesses, that highlighted how we can improve as students and people, and how valuable we are as individuals capable of creating such a beautiful, harmonic synergy.
