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June 4: Engineering Design Process

Today in Stem Skills we worked in groups to make a mode of "transportation" using Knex. To do this we used the engineering method. Step One Define the Problem: The problem is pretty clear make something move from point A to point B Step Two Brainstorm Solutions: A couple ideas came straight to mind, A car, something with wheels, A catapult. As soon as the thought of flinging something came up we knew that that is what we are doing. Step Three Research Ideas: We began to look at the different ways to fling things around. The main ideas are a trebuchet, a catapult, or a ballista. As we looked in to the trebuchet we realized that it would be difficult to build as it has a lot of moving pieces. A catapult seemed like it could work but it did not seem as easy as a ballista as most of the pieces of a catapult are less connected then with a ballista. For a ballista we need to have some form of moving piece and a way to store up ener...

June 10: How to make a rock (using Onshape)

3D printing and my experience with it I have a decent amount of experience with 3D printing, I own a printer and have made a bunch of models. I have printed replacement pieces for board games, stencils for D&D battle maps. Whenever there is a problem that requires a small plastic piece of very specific parameters I can make a solution. At one point the band had water bottles whose handles would snap off every other second so I went and made a file for replacement. It is safe to say that in any practical situation I can make something. There is one thing I have no clue how to do, and that is make something completely impractical, so incredibly pointless that it exist for the shear fact that it exist. Today I made a rock. A quick discussion on the concept of rocks Rocks do not have a reason to exist, they did not decide that they wanted to be, they simply are. Rocks are not uniform they do not attempt to be perfect in any way, a rock that is a p...

June 17: Visualization and AI

Visualization We worked on data visualization over the last 2 class days. Below was the visualization I made to make McDonalds sales make more sense at a glance. Below are the total sales, profit, and number of customers along with sales by country, costumer satisfaction and sales trends. I have found that just looking at the numbers directly usually makes more sense to me then a bunch of fancy pie charts and maps but I can see how they would be useful. It is definitely really helpful for showing off numbers to those who need to get it at a glance or did not work closely with the data. AI AI or Artificial intelligence is a really bad name for what is essentially a bunch of statistics. For example we used it to guess who would have survived and who would have died on the Titanic. To do this we got a list of training data which is a bunch of details about people on the ship and whether or not they survived. The code takes that data and uses it to construc...

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