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Thursday - Friday (27th - 28th)
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Thursday the 27th -- Well, our mock presentation was rather dull mainly because we had no graphics on the powerpoint presentation and many members of the group had not practiced their parts at all. On a good note, our prototype was working. In a short circuit, the prototype ball circled the loop effortlessly with the resounding but gratifying sound of, " vooooom vooooom vooooooom voooooom". Each voom was a complete circuit traveled by the ball as it was propelled by the accelerator. We then video taped this with a digital camera for use in our real presentation on Friday. Since the circuit being traveled was extremely limited in creativity (the opposite of what we wanted), the group decided to build to more accelerators. Having the design of the accelerators all figured out, we estimated it would be feasible to make the accelerators. So, Alberto and I went to work. Today was the most frustrating of all the days in this process. Anyhow, we completed the two new accelerators by 11:00pm due to unexpected problems (you the rule "If it can go wrong, it will"). It was good time especially since it took us 4 days to build the very first accerator. Meanwhile, we hadn't touched the presentation. Needless to say, we worked on the presentation feverishly. The result --- we had an awesome powerpoint presentation packed with animation and information. By the way, it was 4:30am at the time of this completion and three group members had remained till that time. Friday the 28th -- Presentation Day. Most of us had only rested for one hour before we had to be at Professor Slocum's by 7:00am. See, we had to copy our presentation onto Slocum's laptop. Here again, unexpected problems emerged. The movie of our prototype at work would not insert into powerpoint. This problem emerged with every group. Fortunately, Slocum figured out a way to work around the limitations of the program with clever dual program manipulation techniques. Next, our presentation was to big to copy to disk according to our TA who was supposed to bring it to the lab. When we came in contact with her over the phone, she tried to email it to Slocum. That was not working and she did not have a rewriteable CD drive in to copy the presentation. Finally, the email went through and Slocum was able to download it to his laptop and insert our movie. After these problems were dissolved, the team built the huge version of our prototype (with three accelerators, this was made possible). We danced in glee as the prototype worked perfectly. At 9:00 the presentations began (or were supposed to begin, Slocum was also having technical difficulties with the other groups). So, in actuality, they started 20 minutes later. Anyhow, all six groups had produced awesome products. |
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