After completing the Biomed, Media Tech, and Engineering intro modules I realized that I wanted to steer into a more STEAM driven direction. If you don’t know STEAM is short for Science Technology Engineering Art and Math. I decided to start completing more engineering modules just so I could explore into the subject a little deeper and I found myself doing computer science. At first I thought it would involve some sort of use of computers but really it was using these things called LittleBits. Sounds weird right? I had no idea what to expect. They turned out to be these little kits of small components of electronic bits that are designed to help inventors understand the basics of everyday objects. Our assignment was to construct a project that was functional using the LittleBits. At first I was really excited to start working and tinkering with the pieces but I will admit that I was just a tad bit disappointed when I realized building this was going to be harder than I thought. My group and I were kind of limited of supplies and time but I tried staying positive.

After tinkering a while we decided to start brainstorming. Our ideas were pretty out there. They were doable but we were a bit constricted. The first design we had settled on was a dump truck. We even started planning out the design and we started sketching everything out on Adobe illustrator. Everything was going great until we really started to think about how everything was going to work. (Plus I lost my USB drive) we decided it was going to be a great idea but something we could save for the future when we have more time and supplies. We were running out of time and we still didn’t know what to do so we decided to go to the Internet for some ideas. We decided to look at some LittleBits websites and we saw the great idea of having a confetti cannon . At first we were like is this really doable? But then we actually started thinking about a design that could work and we realized that it was actually a great idea. We began to sketch out some ideas and in the end we ended up working really hard in even going to each other’s houses to work on the weekends and I’m really proud of our final product. Our final product was a tissue box with a cylinder top and it had a screen that was supposed to keep the confetti from getting mixed up with the fan made out of some rope that our friend Sandy found and the rest of it was pretty much recycled materials including the confettI. One problem that we stumbled across was the fan. Our original plan for the fan was to make it out of cardboard which we did but when we actually tested it we realize that it didn’t have enough power to actually create enough air currents to blow the confetti in the air. After mentioning this to Mrs. Sauter she helped us find a preconstructed fan that actually did have a lot of power which was really beneficial to our project. After having that addition to our project our our cannon worked really well and I’m really proud of the final product 🙂 After completing this module my thoughts about engineering just keep getting better and better and I’m really glad I chose engineering as my pathway for high school ^_^

To watch our video click here