so what is this project?

the original idea was to create an interactive scene... something people could have fun with... i wanted to make something fun and cute and aesthetically pleasing. then it suddenly hit me. make a park! there are hundreds of different things to put in a park, and i could do almost anything i wanted! i was also excited about making cute little clay animals and people to be in the park. i had my mission... all i had to do was set out and make it happen.

i decided to have four small scenes on each corner of the park. they would be set in motion by touch sensors placed in the center of the board. the touch sensors would be tied to the bottom of flowers, so that when a flower was "picked," the touch sensor would be activated and it would set a scene in motion.

the scenes were really fun to create, and i felt like i had a lot of freedom... who really knows what goes on in my crazy park? anything could happen! so i created four funny little scenes: a puppet show, fish swimming in a pond, baby birds chirping and bobbing up and down in their nest, and a little girl swinging. i made the base of each of these with lovely little legos and a bunch of other crafty items helped me make them what they are today. but how did they begin?

 

but wait... how does it work?

well, you see, we have these things called touch sensors that attach to the handy board that attaches to the motors on each of the scenes. did i lose you already? let me show you:

so when a flower is pulled, a touch sensor is pressed. this sends a message to the handy board to turn on a motor. why? because i wrote a program that tells it to do that! wanna see the code? here it is:

so that may have completely confused you, unless you're a robotics professor... heh. but basically it teaches the handy board how to do different things, like how to "pond" or how to "swing," and when a sensor is pressed, it performs these tasks. and oh, what fun it is! :)

a lot of late nights and hard work certainly paid off. just seeing the look on people's faces when they picked a flower and watched the magic happen made it all worth it for me. i only hope everyone enjoyed my project as much as i enjoyed creating it. :)