Final Project Week 1

Partner: Katrina Montales

Problem: For our final project, we are working to solve one of the problems of the Child Study Center (CSC). We want to create scheduling cues, a way to show/teach kids the concept of time. This entails visualizing how long an activity will be and how long it has been.

We were inspired by this video of a marble music machine.

Our goal: Help the children (ages 2 - 6) visualize how much time is left or has elapsed in an activity.

Benefit: Kids are able to understand how long is left without bothering the teacher. Conceptualize time and translate a concrete image of an amount of marbles to the abstract idea of time.

Original plan for marble releasing mechanism

Mechanism: A motor and Arduino/bricktonics shield controlled marble releasing mechanism. Our original plan was along the lines of this. However, when we started working with the legos we had, we found a track that we could use gears to regulate the release of one marble.

Sensing/Feedback/Control: We plan on using a weight sensor under the marble collector cup to tell the Arduino how much weight is in the cup and calculate how much time until the next marble should be released.


Note: Becky wanted us to find a way to keep the different marbles, representing different activities to stay sorted (so for easier resetting of the mechanism after the end of the day). In addition, she wanted two buttons: one that would release all of the marbles for one activity (effectively ending that activity, if, say, an activity ends early), and one to delay/increase the length of the activity (perhaps proportional to the number of times it is pressed.)

Physical Aspects to Create: A marble releasing mechanism, path for the marbles, rotating cup that holds the marbles to sort them by color.

Progress thus far:

Katrina turns our not yet functional motor by hand. 2x2 block is our fake marble.