Class Update

I wrote about the current state of Design Nature (though since then, I found out that I'm on team Gibbon for the next project!), but I haven't mentioned recently how things are going in my other classes. Summaries of recent events in each class are below the fold!

When Hoppers Hop (or not)

The halfway point of last semester was last Wednesday. It's on the academic calendar, marked as the 33rd day. For freshmen, though, the real halfway point was not Wednesday but Thursday: Hopper Demo Day.

For several days, the studios had been set up for the demos. There was a table in the middle of the room with a black Delrin (plastic) square on it, off of which we would launch our hoppers. A tape measure ran from the table to the ceiling so that on Demo Day we'd be able to measure how high our hopper jumped. There was another tape measure on the table to find horizontal displacement of hoppers.

Before demo-ing, we all had to turn in two spreadsheets. The first kept track of all the Delrin we had used through our prototypes. The second and more interesting spreadsheet asked for the mass of our hopper, its name, and the amount of energy it stored. (Project specs said that energy could be at most three joules). That information was all put into a different spreadsheet which the NINJAs filled out as we demo-ed our hoppers. That spreadsheet had columns for whether or not the trigger worked, whether or not the hopper stayed in one piece, vertical displacement, horizontal displacement, and any other notes.

All we needed in class for Demo Day was our hopper, a print-out of our original design goal, something to write on, and a pen. The instructor handed out a sheet with everyone's names for us to evaluate each others' hoppers. First, we evaluated the challenge level of a person's design goal -- how ambitious were they? Then, we evaluated the extent to which the hopper met the design goal, ranging from "Not at all" to "Nailed it!"

Whispers and the Occasional Private Message

In other words, teaching assistant adventures!

This summer, I had a job as a grader and a problem writer for Art of Problem Solving (AoPS). AoPS teaches online math and programming classes to students who need or want more challenging material than is available in school, and they also teach some very good math competition prep classes. A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from AoPS, and now in addition to grading and problem writing, I'm assisting in classes!

I'm TA-ing two classes: a Pre-algebra 1 section with about 55 students, and an Intro Geometry section with between 35 and 40 students. In both classes I'm one of two TAs, and we usually split up the students by username. For example, in Pre-algebra, I answer the questions of kids with usernames starting with the letters M-Z.

Parts! (And An Experimental Prototype)

The past two or so weeks of Design Nature have mostly involved SolidWorks, a 3D computer-aided design (CAD) software. If you walked through the dorms or the studios at almost any hour, you'd find freshmen CAD-ing. First there was the motion analysis, where we CAD-ed a very simple version of our hopper and used the Solidworks motion simulation software to get a guess for how high our hopper would hop. Then there was the solid model, which involved CAD-ing and assembling all the parts of our hopper to get something that looked like our intended prototype.

My laser cut parts! There's another piece exactly like the little one, but it was already part of the in-progress hopper when I took this picture.