Reflection

Group work
The group work, overall, was pretty good. There was a slight issue with getting both groups together as the lecture times were completely different. Having the sessions moved to a Wednesday helped since the stage 1 students could go to the earlier one and meet with the students from stage 2.

With the actual work, we got the stage 1 students to focus on the blog, design and the real world parts while the stage 2 students were tasked with writing the code for the computer system and arduinos.

The board game

The board game we based our installation on made for an interesting project, and with further development, could continue into other computers; there is possibility to jump from machine to machine using both real world and virtual methods.

Going from the original idea of Mouse Trap being the board game to a Rube Goldburg machine that goes from the real world to the virtual and back out is something that, as far as we know, hasn't been done before. There have been computer based Rube Goldberg machines, but none that interact in the way we have done it.


The installation
The installation was a bit of a pain to setup, thanks to the many parts we were using. Once it was setup and we ran a few test runs we were confident that the final run would go smoothly enough to capture on video for presentation.

What we liked
The machine is very awe-inspiring. Getting it up and running was a pain, but once it was fully running it was exciting watching each part knock together. We also liked how we had setup the real world part of the machine, because it was the hardest part to visualise for things like mock-ups. In the end it turned out very well.

What could of been improved

Communication could have been improved vastly, and was one of the more troubling parts of this project. With better communication, the project time scale could have been vastly improved.

What we have learnt

We have learnt that organization is very important, as each of us had other commitments we needed to attend to so could not always turn up to meetings. Some members of the project had work, so some days had to be missed because we could not get everyone together to work on it.