_____ So, why a Coffee Troll? Jessica, Holly, and Tarja are all in a class called Robotics 115 that takes place during Wintersession at Wellesley College. This course is a half credit class, either for Computer Science or Physics, and is called Robotics Design Studio (Robotics 115). One of the requirements to finish this class is to break off in groups and create a robot to be displayed at a small exposition in Sage Lounge of the Science Center. It is for this project that we decided to build the Coffee Troll.
_____ We were musing with the idea of building some sort of interactive scenery during the brainstorming session for a long time. The intial project we wanted to do would have been some sort of choose your own adventure maze, much the way the books by the same name work, but with robots. The drawback, however, was that this was going to be more scenery building than actual robotics, and we had wanted to do something programming and design intensive--and more along the lines of an actual robot that performed a specific task.
_____ And so it goes. There was much brainstorming and much coffee drinking, and it popped into Jessica's head that we might make a robot that makes coffee (Jessica has more coffee than she knows what to do with and frequently complains about needing coffee to wake her up, but is never awake enough to actually go and make the coffee. So why not have a robot do it?) Where the troll part comes in, we don't actually know. Jessica probably thought a little TOO hard, (or had just seen LOTR) and wanted to make the robot eat lego people too. This last part probably would have been dismissed, if not for Alex Thorn's encouragement. Thanks, Capey! :)
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