Lab 0 - Questions

1. We've learned that the early stages of designing is very important. We began the lab by constructing the main shooter and not giving much thought to the loading mechanism or consequences caused by the delivery mechanism (such as vibrations). This lead to numerous problems during our construction phase and we had to continuously redesign our system to overcome obstacles as they came along. This wasted precious time and also contributed to our poor craftsmanship.

2. Brainstorming did lead to a few ideas but not as many as we had originally hoped for. We had only two members of our team for our initial brainstorm session and we hadn't disassembled our toy. Both of these hindered our creativity in our design. We ended up brainstorming as we built our project, which did lead to some creative ideas.

3. Overall I believe the spring and lever were the most robust of the final design. The least robust was the gear heads that broke repeatedly during our construction phase at which point we simply threw out. In our final design the least robust portion was the loading mechanism. The entertaining value was how quickly our device shot the balls. It took a little over a second to shot five balls. This resulted in a spread shot pattern that was difficult to aim.

4. It was apparent that we avoided electrical circuits all together. All of our designed revolved around mechanical actuations instead of using electronic sensors. We also ended up quickly constructing our final design which lead to some poor craftsmanship which probably hinder the effectiveness of our device as well.