Activity/Project Assignment

Nick Robles and Jon Henry

Make a Game: Blindfold Challenge

• Get through a series of obstacles to reach a destination and win the game.
• Rules:
• blindfolded player is not allowed to see where is going.
• only communication is through partner.
• blindfolded player is unable to talk.
• contact illegal between players
• Achievements:
• get through the course without hitting any of the obstacles - 5pts.
• each object you hit - negavtive 1pt.
• picking up objects placed strategically within the course - 3pts.
• fastest time - 7pts
• slowest - negative 3.14159 pts
• communication by sounds not words - 3pts.

Mobile Game Development: Enrichment Lesson 2!

1) What's a "game"? Come up with a short definition of a game (the shorter the better!). If you made bullet points, what would the key aspects of a game be? Keep it to three or four ideas.

• feedback: experience bar, levels, achievements. 
• goal: how to win or lose.
• rules: limits actions so people have to do things a certain way.
• voluntary play: people should want to play your game.

2) Watch the Orb Smasher tutorial. The tutorial is about 45 minutes. It can be found on the learning corona website.

• I have already done the orb smasher tutorial. I will continue to learn about animation for this is going to be the next topic. 
• Two videos stood out to me. There is one on flying geese and one about the basics of animation. Both of these i will watch in the Engineering projects class as well as on my own time. 

3) What questions do you have? Create a list of any questions you have about Corona SDK or using Lua. These questions will help me adjust our experience.

• No questions have arisen for me yet. I am a little mystified about what ready = false/true; does though. I am sure i will figure this out as I continue my progress with Corona SDK. 

Make a Game in 8 Minutes

A great question came up in class. "Is this really a game?"

• I don't think this is a game because it has no requirements to win or loose. It has no pass or fail. It has no hit or miss. No score and no timer. 

What do you think? What makes a game a "game"?

• I really think a game needs criteria of succeed and fail. This would mean a timer or a score. Some incentive to play longer then 30 seconds because u dropped one of the 3 balloons. If there was a score or a timer then you would be competitive with yourself to try and beat a previous SCORE. 

Game Changer

1) What was the “Moneyball”approach that Billy Beane and Peter Brandt applied to the Oakland Athletics 2002 season? Was it an “art” or a “science”? What single statistic did they boil their value consideration down to? (In class research/discussion)

• they used stats to find under-rated players that could play
• science
• on base percentage

2) What is the equation used to calculate OBP? (In class research/discussion)

• times getting on base(walk/hit)/ total at bats

3) What is design? (In class research/discussion)

• Design- to put creativity into words and on paper. 

4) Describe 3 situations where movie characters (intentionally or not) applied a step from the PLTW 12 Step Design Process. Explain both the (a) situation as well as (b) how the step is relevant:
1 -when Billy Beane and his old expert scouts BRAINSTORMED on who to draft

2 - when Billy Beane asked them to identify the problem

3 - make adjustments to fix problems(basically entire movie, the adjustment was the moneyball strategy)


5) What is “Leadership”? List the three aspects of leadership that we come up with in class. (In class research/discussion)

1 - stepping up
2 -doing whats best for the team
3 - asking for help


6) Describe 3 circumstances from the story where a character exercised effective leadership:
1 - Billy Beane asked for money from his manager

2 - when he traded Jeremy Giombe and the first baseman to help the team

3 -when he drafted the money ball draft picks to better help the team



7) According to the movie, what was the A’s record at the start of their winning streak? __77_ : __51_

8) What does this ratio simplify to (roughly)? __1.5_ : 1

9) How long was the A’s record setting winning streak? __20_ games won.

10) Given the A’s win/loss ratio at the start of the streak (listed two questions above), what are the odds of winning 20 games in a row? Run the numbers. (In class research/discussion)

• Something like .0003% 

11) Based on your calculation, do you think the A’s got lucky or was there something to the Moneyball approach?

• there was definitely other factors that aren't approached in the movie like which teams did they play and so on. there was definitely a degree of luck though.

12) Did Billy Beane strictly apply the “science” of Moneyball to his management approach? Was there an “art” to his efforts as well? Describe a circumstance where he broke from the Moneyball approach to make a positive change for the team.

• again its both because he used science to draft the players but art to manage them. for example drafting Jeremy. he was a moral killer in the locker room so he traded him even though he was a good pick stat wise. 

Assembly Line Class Challenge

Overview

• In this challenge we were tasked with building an assembly line to put numbered dots onto a cube. (dice)
• My specific group of Nick and I were instructed to be group 4 and mark side "3".
• We had to move the dice from the recieving point to the drop off point.
• During this time we had to mark the die in some way
• We used motors to stop the track and to move a red pronged thing to mark the die.

Acheivements

• 4 class achievments
• 6 team achievments
• 6 individual

Achievment Justifications

• Class achievements
• Implementation
• Fast
• Faster
• Stewardship
• Team Achievements
• If you build it
• Proof is in the pudding
• Round and Round we go-We did not know if we had to build a solution to flip the dice/cube
• Round and Round we go again- We had to connect ours with Gustavos and Hunters which was a challenge and we had to fix the transfer system on ours to accomidate to the others around us.
• No Soliciting-Marco and Hunter gave us the idea of using numatics but we declined saying that it was to confusing for us.
• Leave no Trace
• Individual Acheivments
• Share it-we provided feedback questioning Marco's team asking him the benifets of using numatics and other qualities in their device.
• Keep the customer in mind
• Nice one-Hunter/Marco
• Helping Hand-I think we helped Andoni/Ryan
• Meta Gamer-gives us inspiration to work together as a class to attain a certain goal.
• And the Winners are
• initiative-Marco/Hunter helping us without us asking
• sportsmanship-Nikki/Morgan for having a decent project but having a couple of setbacks that they worked through
• Callaboration-Ryan/Andoni and Gustavo/Nick for working together and completeing their project as a group
• Humor-Ryan/Andoni because throughout the project they turned peoples backpacks inside out including mine multiple times.
• Improvisation-Thomas/Cody for fixing jacksons and adding the taped on peices that created traction for the blocks as they climbed the track.

Graph for Lever

• Today we did an expirement in class that included a lever and some force
• Our objective was to find out of force as you moved back from the focal point and find out of it what kind of force multiplication happened (expidential, linear, logarithmic)

• From the data we have collected we have concurred that the lever as you move it back has expidential growth
• We moved it back every 5 cm and got a larger measurement each time.

My Eagle Project

I started with pvc pipe and I set out to create two water proof wheel chairs and a life jacket rack.

First the chairs ^ above are what I built as a base to start the scouts off.


Soon they built what we have there.


Almost done. Adding the wheels.


Oh yeeeaaahhh! finally done

Part II the life jacket rack


We built a wooden jig to make sure the holes in the pvc pipe were straight.


Built the arms for the Rack first to make it easy on ourselves.


The wheel assembly.


I'm all done. Yay.

Overall this project was a challenge. I had to deal with shortages of work force. In all I had about 6 scouts and one non- scout who dedicated more then 1 hour. Andoni who was the non- scout who worked very well and listened as well as the other scouts. A bunch of other scouts who were helpful were Thomas Luppi who basically led the assembly of the chairs. I had a lot of adult help. Outside of the troop Bobby Kozan helped supervize alot of drilling for the rack. Another adult was Mr. Laughlin who came up with the tools and helped with the small details of tool work that I didnt know. Another challenge was not knowing the exact design wheel assembly. We ultimately changed the design to use threaded axels to make the wheel assembly easier.

I had alot of fun and this eagle project was a great experience.