Preliminary Ideas

Brainstorming took us a long time! Knowing that our target audience was young children, we wanted our project to be fun, interactive, and attractive to kids. We eventually decided to base our project on the DreamWorks movie, "Kung Fu Panda"...not only because kids love the movie, but also because we are huge fans as well! Given the time frame in which we were to build this project, we knew it would be impossible to create all the main characters in the movie. It was hard to decide on which characters to make, because the three of us were in love with all of them!

Eventually, we decided on the following four characters/robots:

• Oogway : the wise, old turtle

  He was made to be a fortune teller. Our original idea was that when someone would pet his shell (inside of which a light sensor would be hidden), his head and legs would emerge from the shell to tell a fortune. We thought that we could record different Oogway quotes from the movie and program the robot to answer randomly. However, including a tape recorder seemed rather cumbersome...which meant more brainstorming! Professor Berg suggested making Oogway raise an answer bubble from his shell, eliminating the need for a recorder. While this was a great suggestion, we had no idea how to mechanically create a way for different answer bubbles to come out of his shell. More brainstorming! We finally came up with the idea of using LED's for Oogway's eyes, so that they would light up with different colors randomly; each color would mean a different answer.

• Dragon Head catapult

  Originally, this was supposed to be Shifu (the master of Kung Fu) throwing a dumpling (one of Po's favorite foods). But after deciding that Po and Tai Lung would compete for whatever object was launched from this catapult, we realized that it needed to be the Dragon Scroll. We built a catapult motion module, and decorated it to look like a dragon head. In the final product, a touch sensor triggered the catapult to throw the Dragon Scroll out of the dragon's mouth.

• Po : the lazy, lovable panda (and the main character of the movie!)
• Tai Lung : the evil snow leopard (Po's enemy)

  We decided to make Po and Tai Lung our mobile characters, putting them on wheels. In the movie, the characters fight for the magical Dragon Scroll that holds the secret to all power. So we wanted both characters to compete for this scroll; we thought one could be automatically moving (maybe follow-line) and the other which would be audience-controlled has to fight against it to win the magnet dragon scroll. But that meant that the scroll needed to land reliably in the same place for the follow-line character to reach it. So we ended up making Po move based on the loudness of the audience member's voice, detected by a hand-held sound sensor, and attaching light sensors on Tai Lung's shoulders and making him follow in the direction of whichever sensor detected light; when the flashlight was taken away, Tai Lung stopped. Likewise, Po would stop when he got the scroll, which would cover the light sensor at the end of the sticks he was carrying.

Site Created By: Stephanie Lau '11, Sang-Hee Min '11, Chan Myae Myae Soe '12
Date Created: 27 January 2009