Clifford goes to Treasure Island

Design Journal

January
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January 21

Craft run: we need paint brush, paint for the boxes, cardboard, maybe paper, blue paper for the ocean, poster board, block of cheap white clay to make pirate. We found all this stuff at A.C. Moore. Stephanie is going home over the weekend, and she’s going to ask her dad to build us a sandbox and cut the wood handle off of our paintbrush so we can attach it to our piston/sweeping device.

While Stephanie and I were on the craft run, Karen figured out how we could attach the handy board and the piston to our car.

Disguising the ship: make it look like a pirate ship/truck, a carriage, a giant pirate. We think we’re doing the pirate wagon – seems the most appropriate, given the wheels. A pirate truck seems a little too weird.

Attaching the sensors: Prof. Berg got the new magnetic sensors he’d ordered today, so we attached two of them to the front and modified our code so that it was “listening” for both sensors. Now, if switch 7 senses something, the car stops, beeps, and prints out “treasure on right!” and vice versa for switch 8. The sensors are only about an inch apart, so the difference in position of the magnet isn’t that great, but having two sensors means that we’re more likely to “see” the treasure.

We modified the code so that the car backs up for a couple tenths of a second once it has found the treasure. This is necessary because the magnetic sensors are behind the sweeper, so if the vehicle stopped right when it found the magnet, we’d be sweeping in front of the treasure instead of over it.

After the craft run, we spent some time talking about web pages. Karen and I both have web page design experience, for now we’ve decided to split the work up so each of us can work on it on our own time. I’ll (Jeanna) be doing the journal, Karen will be working on the main page and Stephanie will be doing the page that displays and explains the coding for our project.