As you've probably noticed the past few days i haven't exactly kept up to date with my blog entries but luckily, today ive got a whole bunch of exciting stuff from the past few days that i personally found was really great.
Monday 7th March
This week started off once again arriving an hour earlier than needed to our Introduction to creative technologies lecture but once the lecture started i found myself thinking a lot about what it was that made me choose to take the course, what decisions affected me making that decision? What do i plan on achieving by the end of the course? Basically what our lecturer Maggie was trying to get us to do was really start to get our minds around the concept of thinking about the way that we think and it was actually quite an intense feeling at first as it was pushing me to really rethink about why it was that i have made the choices that i have and think about possible factors that had lead to those choices, overall a very interesting concept that i think will be quite useful. After the Lecture we had our lunch break and started our next lecture, Physical Computing. Now going into the lecture i quite honestly had no idea what to expect and to be honest at the end of it it seemed like a slightly more complex version of first year electronics at high school only with the added aspect of a computer into the mix supposedly controlling circuit flow. To be honest the lecturer Julian didn't exactly capture my interest very well for a number of reasons, his body language was screaming nervousness and he seemed like he was quite intimidated by us when talking to us as a group but also he lacked a certain spark that the previous lecturer Maggie had, another probably quite crucial factor was the fact that quite frankly it was nearing the end of the day and i was feeling physically quite tired. I didn't actually feel that i got anything out of his lecture except for the fact that next week we have to have purchased a bunch of expensive equipment just so we can make an LED flash.... sure its a starter project but spending a large amount of money on equipment for such a basic project seems a little strange and my opinion the sooner we get onto projects that actually capture our interest the better.
Tuesday 8th March
Now what an amazing day that was! We spent our day working in the studio on a group of small projects designed to get us working effectively in a team whilst collaborating creative ideas to create and develop a new chess piece. I worked in a group with Jim and Sam and originally we all had all sorts of different ideas for characters to base our piece around and often had conflicting ideas. While our ideas conflicted we resolved the issue by taking in aspects that we liked from a variety of the characters while deciding on a piece that we all liked. It made me realise how easily such a simple task can become a lot more complicated when working in a group and ideally it made us think more and develop the design of our piece far more than any of the designs of our other pieces. Our final piece was the Reaper piece which basically was the symbol of death and the fear of death upon the battlefield and when it came to rules regarding the piece we came up with a bunch that were quite respective to that concept. The Reaper was originally considered wraith like where the restrictions of our world simply did not affect it in anyway so we took that aspect and involved that in our movement where the edge of the chess board was no longer a restriction but instead the reaper would casually flow seamlessly across from one edge of the board to the direct opposite while moving across spaces in any direction similar to that of the queen only with the restriction of only being able to move 3 squares at a time as to not make the game to unbalanced. When it came to taking pieces we decided to restrict it to only being able to take out lesser pieces more likely to be affected by the fear of death a.k.a the pawns but also the figure head of the army, the king, whom almost certainly once faced by death would cower why else would he be hidden behind his troops on the battlefield. Other pieces like the queen, knights, rooks and bishops had characteristics that allowed them to withstand the fear of death, eg. the knights bravery or the bishops faith, but were also the only pieces able to remove the reaper from play. We thought it would be appropriate that the only way that the reaper could be slain was for the opposing piece to embrace the idea of death and through self-sacrifice remove both itself and the reaper from play.
After coming up with the design we were then given LEGO Mindstorm kits to use to assemble a robot that was based upon the rules of our piece to race the following morning. So for our robot we used a very basic car shape whilst also adding in a pair of claws that could supposedly grab onto other robots and through programming allow us to then fling the robot around while it span only to laugh and pursue its next victim. With the design of our robot we tried to make it look as sinister and fearful as possible by adding lots of excess spikes and other jagged shapes. When put to the test it proved quite accurate to our rules, moving freely around without restriction and removing robots, but in order to take ours out of the race other robots had to be sacrificed to bring our rampage to a halt.
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