Out of all the activities so far in class this semester, I believe this one may have been the most stressful but also the most rewarding. The motor would constantly falter, work and then once taped break the wires would fall out or the battery would suddenly need to be switched out halting the creative process in its spot. However, once Corina and I were able to work through the struggles, rework the design issues and test out both the prototype bot and the final version for the competition. However, because of the struggles we faced in building the Drawing Bots once it continuously made a pattern on the paper and did not fall the feeling of success was much stronger than it had been in any other creation because of the effort put into this project.

As part of the stressful yet rewarding process of making the Drawing Bot I believe that the Design Thinking Process was very closely related to how my group approached the assignment. We started by wondering how, for the final project, we were going to make the project reflect the word we were given (Ask). Additionally, we looked on google for other examples of Drawing Bots to see what other people have done for ideas. Then we had to think about the materials available in class and the time we had and how that may limit what we could or could not do. Next we figured out basic ideas for what we wanted to see for the word joyous and how we would express it in motion and how we would place the motor and battery to balance out the different sized cup (Imagine). Afterwards we moved onto experimenting with the layout which is where the struggles really began (Build and Evaluate). The motor would constantly stop working or the wires would break and we would have to figure out how to place the sensitive motor on top of the cup gently without to much pressure and without hot gluing the wires down as well. We finally worked out most of the kinks before moving on to the final step of the Design Thinking Process by competing with the rest of the class and then expanded on our project during the debrief afterwards (Share).

I believe that this is a really interesting project to do with students because it allows them to explore how to create their own robots outside of a STEM program and in a way that involves them thinking about a theme to tie their robot into. The idea of having the project be one day however only works with students who are older as I believe students in the lower half of middle school may need one class to work on understanding on how to work on the first test run bot and then the next day can be working towards and on the final bot and competition allowing them to go home and think about the theme and come to class with some ideas so they have a little more prep time. Other wise I think this project is very beneficial and adaptable to any art classroom as it helps bring affordable 3-D materials and electronics into an art curriculum that in elementary and middle schools can often times be strictly 2-D due to costs.

An additional bonus to this project is that it involves working in groups. When there were issues and something went wrong or broke it was easier to solve the problem and feel like there was a solution and reach when I could bounce an idea off of my partner. Often times when doing projects like these alone when “failure” occurs the weight of the problem falls solely on the one creator and makes it hard for success to shine through after defeat. When working in a group however, everyone supports each other so no one is truly left to solve a problem completely on their own. As such if I were to incorporate this into a future lesson plan I would also make sure that this was a group project so that students could support each other through both ups and downs during the activity.