So we were sitting together around a table. “How about we make a dog, and then the Little Bits can make the tail wag!” Exclaims my friend and teammate Ora.

That was our original idea, but as you can tell from the title, that idea didn’t exactly workout.

Unfortunately, most of our time spent was wasted figuring out what type of dog we wanted to create. Unfortunately we never found our answer, instead we decided to agree to disagree and we decided that we will look for instructions on how to make a dog using a laser cutter, and whatever dog that the instructions were written to make, we would make… but we never found instructions.

You may think, ‘The internet has almost everything, how could you not find these instructions?’ Well, I honestly have no idea, I just know that the website we were recommended to use did not have what we needed, but honestly after thinking about it, I’m glad we didn’t work on our original idea, because I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much as I did working on our clock.

In the beginning, we thought we would incorporate our dog idea and make a dog clock. We tried looking for instructions, but the instructions never surfaced. We later decided to make a regular steriotypical circle clock, and we did make a circle clock, but we added a small twist to make our clock unique and different. Instead of numbers, we used words, instead of 1, we used, one, and applied that method to the rest of our clock.

At first, I felt a bit useless, both of my partners knew what they were doing, and I honestly had no idea what was going on, the only way I could possibly help was to pitch ideas, but that part was over, and we already knew what we were making. My partners were working with the program Adobe Illustrator which I’ve never used in my life, so I let my partners who were familiar with the program use it, and I did my best to watch what they were doing, but we all have our different ways of learning, and I’m afraid that method did not work out very well. I was still clueless, and I wanted to help desperately but I couldn’t, and let me tell you, that’s the worst feeling ever.

I’m not here to tell you about all of the negative thoughts that I felt, the only reason, I bring out the negative, is so that you can appreciate the positivity that occurred near the end. After my partners were finished using Adobe Illustrator, and I finished with trying to catch up to what they were doing on the program yet failed miserably (but at least I tried, and I’m quite proud of myself for that), It was time to use the laser cutter. Laser cutting is more simple than it looks, so that was an easy part, the only problem we had was trying to schedule a time to use the laser cutter, because a bunch of students and staff use the laser cutter daily, but eventually our clock was finally made. Now we just needed to make the hands move.

Although, it may seem like a small task, making the hands move using the Little Bits was my favorite part of the project because it took a lot of effort and I got to take leadership (Well our school is for young women leaders is it not?) and I got to do something that I didn’t feel confused about, it seems as if it came naturally to me, I can’t explain the feeling but while working, I just felt so accomplished.

My partners and I didn’t know how we would make the clock hands turn. Especially when we had a small problem: the hole to insert the hands was a tad bit too small, but that didn’t stop us. I decided we should use a toothpick to hold both of the hands, and that worked. Now we needed to connect the hands of the clock to the toothpick that would go into the hole. This process didn’t happen so smoothly because somehow one of our hands broke and we had to repair it, and a few other things here and there, but although we had a few problems, I didn’t care, the same happy feeling that I felt still remained and I was glad to help. Finally we got the hands in place and everything was coming close to an end, but then we had to thicken the toothpick because it was too skinny to fit the Little Bits hole that would move the hands to our clock. I used masking tape and hot glue to make the toothpick fit, and it worked. Now we needed a place for the Little Bits to sit since they couldn’t just hang there and fall off because of the forces of gravity. So I made a box to contain the Little Bits and hot glued it to the backside of the clock, this was also a bit tricky because the first time we did this we didn’t glue it correctly but on our second try, the box was located where it needed to be and the Little Bits sat in there, making the hands in our clock move was such an enjoyable experience. Knowing that I did that, although it seems so small and may be such a silly thing, I felt so good knowing I did that, that I took part in making that clock.

 

I hope you will be able to feel what I felt while making this clock in the future.

Sincerely, Ginger Rodriguez