Day 8 - Group 9

A) We were not able to complete the objective of scoring the ball on the target. Two or three parts of the machine at certain parts throughout the process either failed or were not completely accurate, and out targeting mechanism only worked a percentage of the time anyway. Other than that, the rest of our project worked well outside of testing (of course).
B) Looking back, I’d say we should have used our first few days more effectively. Towards the end, we were able to get a lot done faster because we spent all of our free time working on parts, along with working on many of the parts at home. Earlier on, we hadn’t done that enough as we probably could have. The planning process took up the first 2-3 days and continued to adapt throughout. Overall, we had a pretty solid planning process for the amount of time we were dealing with. As for our group dynamic, we probably could have involved all the member’s inputs on the initial design process in order to see a broader amount of ingenuity and ideas about how to solve the problem.
C) We certainly learned that we needed better organization skill. Not everyone was building as efficiently on the first few days that were vital due to the short amount of time we had. I think as a group, another thing we learned was that when staring in the face of inevitable failure, the best thing to do is to cut your losses. Lastly, we of course learned how to use simple machines in order to gain mechanical advantages and use simple devices to achieve complicated tasks.

Sean Torpey, Alex Motter, George Rodriguez, Matthew Tullis