This project was extremely fun to create and test because I never knew what would happen. Every time we added something new or changed the way the image was supported the motor may not unbalance everything. I believe that one of the reasons I was so excited to begin this activity was because the minute I heard moving pictures I was reminded of Harry Potter and wanted to make something that was as interesting as the portraits had been both in the books and on the movie screens to me as a child. Once my Marla and I understood how to get the motor and battery to stay connected to each other after the prototype session in class, the difficult part was not the creating part of the project. Much of the issues came later on when putting the final project altogether.

Working with Marla was great as we were able to bounce many ideas off of each other and divide up the work so that we were able to finish in time. I do not believe this project would have been possible in one day if the project was designed to be completed individually. Even so, I do believe it would have benefited from a second day, at least half of the second class period to work on the project taking the entire first day to prototype. As previously stated, the issues truly arose once we attempted to attach a spinning flower to the back of our woman who would turn in a circle on a base made out of black and white words. As it took most of the time to construct the final products and get motors and batteries balanced underneath the weight of the pictures and the stands they rested on, there was not enough time to work out new ways of attaching the flower once our main two ideas did not pan out. As such we were unable to attach the flower to the lady. On Saturday, the two of us discussed that setting up a second stand for the flower close enough so that it looked like it was attached to the woman while spinning on its own may have worked, but that would have required more time for the project.

Our theme came about from a conversation where we mentioned Adam and Eve and religion and how often times Eve is blamed for all that went wrong negating that Adam told her she would die from touching the tree, which the snake used as a counterpoint showing that perhaps nothing bad would happen, and Adam did not have to eat the apple himself and that sometimes religious figures go against the rules of the faith they claim to follow if it benefits them. We happened to be looking at an image of a woman standing in a powerful pose with lines across her body that almost seemed topographical and we proposed that perhaps she was her own Garden of Eden and that she created life as well and wanted to represent her strength and symbolize that with a flower, like those of Georgia O’Keefe.

By breaking up the assignment in class, which in turn broke up the Design Thinking Process, I think I was able to more thoroughly consider how I wanted to approach the project. During the prototype stage by focusing only on Ask, Imagine and Build; Marla and I were able to cement the ideas we wanted to showcase in our final project as well as try out which battery and motor type we wanted to use and experiment with the setup. By doing this, we were able to figure out what we did not want to place the motor on a piece of cardboard as well as other details that may have slowed down the creative process if we had not had so much time to focus solely on Ask, Imagine and Build. As such, we were able to ask questions and pose possible solutions so that we could create enough hypotheses regarding what would happen once we moved on to the final version of our project.

Additionally, by then solely being able to focus on our final rendition of the assignment in the second part of class our Design Thinking Process was very different from our earlier one. As we had devoted time to run through certain scenarios we were able to get right to work and though there were some complications our problems (Ask), solutions (Imagine), prototypes (Build), testing (Evaluate), and demos (Share) were only about the final rendition and not about learning how any of the tools worked together. This meant that we were able to work a little bit faster in putting the creation together as we were slightly more confident in our abilities to create a moving picture.

I think a project like this is an assignment that is better left for junior high or high school as it requires a little more patience than some of the other projects we have done in the past. Even so, I would be interested in adapting this to a lesson plan, I may use the technique we used in the Drawing Bot assignment and have students in pairs and then have them come up with several themes before picking them out of a hat. I think it may be an interesting twist on the idea and if the project were to remain a one-day assignment may allow for it to go slightly faster. Otherwise, my only chance would be to make the activity a two-day assignment as I believe the final part of the project requires a little more time than was provided in our class.