The final home stretch. Okay so last time on Glee, I changed my sketch to a chair fixer thingy, that would make this wonderful chair I grew up with stop wobbling. After submitting, my wonderfully amazing and smart teacher recommended making it a cup like stucture rather than a cube so that I didn’t have to duct tape it to the leg, which is smart.

This is my final design, she’s cute. In my perspective, it looks big enough, but I soon found thats she’s actually kinda small.

So then, I did the mesh mixing, like we’re supposed to. It took every fiber in my body to not add that bunny onto it, but I dont think my mom would like a bunny head chair coaster for Christmas, so I’ll stick to the cool chair thingy I made.

Finally, I “sliced” it, which doesn’t make much sense to me cause its not like it cut into pieces, and i didnt get any screenshots of that cause I forgot and I already deleted all the .stl files and stuff off my computer and I dont wanna do it again so you’ll just have to believe me about it.

The print literally took 6 minutes. And she’s small. But it’s fine, I’m fine

So I am not at home, where this specific chair is for this project, which means I have to find something else to shove this under to prove it works, and that is gonna be a struggle. Not only is this thing really small, its also like completely square, and thats not super normal for chairs, especially in my apartment apparently.

I could not find a single chair or couch or anythng to fit this under, and thankfully i am going home the day this is due so I will be able to at least try it, but first here are some pictures of it under things I found in my room that it fits under.

Alright folks its the moment we’ve been waiting for. Here she is, under a chair!

Alright so here’s the thing. I made this for another chair in my house, but when I made the design the first time, I made the dimensions smaller than the chair leg becasue it was supposed to just be a plate and then I would glue it onto the chair. BUT then, I changed my design to the cup because I was told it would be a better idea and it totally is… if I had changed the dimensions. So it is way too small for the orignal chair, BUT I found not one, but TWO chairs to put this under.

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Okay but for real, this second chair was wobbly before I put the thingy under, but it wasn’t while the thingy was there, and I call the a win.

So in conclusion, if I had to do this project again, or make this specific things again, I would use the same design but make it a little wider on all sides so it would fit the designated chair, as well as make the bottom thicker to ensure there would be no wobble.

Overall, I call this a success, at least one of the chairs in my house is no longer wobbly.

Throughout this semester I think I have truly shown how unexperienced with technology I am, therefore any chance to not have to do something i will take. That beung said, i decided to take the assessment grade rather than do the actual robotics project.

So, I have to talk about something I would have done if I did actually do the project, which is cool cause I like talking. However, being that I don’t even understand what a Pi actually is, its gonna take a lot of research to find out what and how to make something usable with the Pi. Therefore my research began with this wonderful google search.

Being the lazy college student I am, I clicked the video that was less than two minutes long first. Not gonna lie, the video sucked, but he had a full how to guide in the description that I clicked on.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-retro-game-console-498561192

So this article goes into a bunch of detail on how to make this work, and I feel like if I was actually doing this project then this is what I would do. I know my dad likes playing old games so I would probably give it to him when I was done, but knowing him he wouldn’t ever use it cause in the end he’d much rather watch hockey.

I have everything on this list that he said I would need, except the controller, but I found a cool one on amazon.

He then goes into details on how to set everything up, and I’m not gonna lie I didn’t really read them cause I’m not actually doing it but they seem pretty easy.

The last step was to move any ROM’s of games that I already have, which I dont, so I didn’t add that in.

But yeah, thats what I would have done if I had to actually do this project, but thankfully I do not.

https://stephistechblogging.wordpress.com/2019/12/10/vr-game-yay/

That’s Stephanies blog post!^

For the VR game making experience, Stephanie and Istruggled. Hard. We had an idea of what we wanted to make, a farm, but we kept having problems. At one point we had like 25 errors, for things we didnt know how to fix.

It took us almost an hour to figure out how to make something solid, we kept making a floor and then all the animals would fall through it cause we couldn’t do that coliding thing, and in the end we just switched computers and started over.

We found some cool assets for free of farm animals, as well as the standard assets, making it so that we have more than what we were shown in class. When we got this landscape set up, it was really really big, and so we started making everything really big, so now we have giant pigs and sheep, and then smaller chickens and trees.

For the longest time, we couldn’t find the colliding button, so that when you run near the house or animals, you wouldn’t run right through it. So I asked John while he was also here working on his project and he showed us how to add a component and we just made box colliding for everything that we didn’t want to run through.

Once we finished placing things in the game (including a car that also moves when the person moves????), we tried to export the game onto a USB and then play it, but somehow we got lucky enough to be working on a computer that had the Oculus plugged in and ready to use and when i clicked “Build and Run” it started playing and we just put it on and took a video.

In all, the whole thing wasn’t that hard, you just kinda have to know what you’re doing, and be willing to try over and over again to get something to work. We were expecting to be able to move things around more, and be able to climb stairs maybe, but that didn’t happen, and that’s okay. Not gonna lie, if i paid to play this game, I’d be mad, because the only things that happened while I played with the headset on was run into giant pigs and almost get hit by a car that no one was driving.

So here’s the deal. I did my first fabricating for a function on my phone cord that broke, however that was like 2 weeks ago and since then I have gotten a new one. Therefore I no longer need a peice to fix it.

I have been home for a week now and I sit in the same chair for dinner every night, the same old wobbly chair since I was 16, and I decided now I will fix this problem with a hunk of plastic.

I told my mom I was going to do my project on this wobbly chair and she told me it was stupid and I should do something better, but I then reminded her who she was talking to, and she realized that even this would probably be too hard for me.

So back to FreeCad I went. I actually hate every part of this, but, I think I have found something I can do and it wont be too hard. The fact that I changed my object to something more simple made me more excited to do this casue I did it in like 10 minutes, after I measured my chair.

So I ended up with this cool looking thing. I couldnt figure out how to make all the measurements show up, but the whole thing is 23.828 mm wide by 22.454 long and 3.5mm tall.

I also curved the corners on the top too cause I felt like I had done it too fast, and I wanted to make it fancy.

Okay so I guess I can show you my chair now too. Please ignore the hair, my mom and I shed like dogs so there is hair literally everywhere.

So there is currently a felt pad on the chair to make it not wobbly but it does not work. I measured the distance between the actualy chair leg and the ground, and it was about 8 mm. My thingy is only 3.5 mm tall becasue I plan to put it on the chair with duct tape and i foresee that taking up space, and if anything its been wobbly forever and it can be wobbly forever.

In the blog post “what i learned from your blog posts #6-10,” I was super interested to see the different software people liked to use. Socrative, Kahoot, and Edmodo were all things I have used before and it was interesting to see that other people used those softwares as well, being that i used some of them when I was even in middle school! It was also interesting to see that some people did not agree with the flipped classroom model, because i was personally super interested in it and thought that most teachers would like this idea. However, I can see why some teachers would like to lecture in class time, such as to make sure the students get all the right information and that the studnts are actually learning the material.

I would personally like to learn more about Excel and how it can be used in the classroom. The assignment this week is using excel to make gradebooks and such, but i wonder how else it could be used, as well as how to use many of the functions we havent learned yet. I also wonder if Excel can be taught in classrooms, especially in the younger ages. I know that i took a computer class in highschool where we learned how to use Miscrosoft Office, such as Word and Excel, but I think they could be taught sooner to help with assignments and make work more interactive, such as maybe how to compute their own grades.

The Flipped Classroom is an idea that I think I would like to follow as an educator. As a student, I always hated listening to a lecture in class and then have to go practice the materials at home, because I would end up needing help and I wouldn’t be able to get it from the teacher. In the Flipped Classroom model, students learn the material at home and then practice in the classroom, making it easier to follow along and ask questions about the practice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdKzSq_t8k8

With the Interactive Non-linear Powerpoint assignment, I learned new skills I can use in and outside the classroom. I had seen before that you could make games and such with powerpoint, but I never understood how it could in an order other than linear. However, learning about the buttons and how it is possible to move around the presentation without going in an order made it seem more possible for me to use powerpoint for other things and cool activities.

In the blog post “what I learned from your blog posts #1-5,” an interesting topic I saw was about how lesson plans might be changed due to new technology that Abraham brought up. I think this is an interesting idea, and I agree. I have always seen lesson plans on paper and with worksheets, but with new technological advancements in the classroom every day, new lesson plans should evolve with them.

So we were assigned to come up with something that makes our lives hard and then tell you about it and i waited till the last minite to do it so the best i could come up with is the fact that my phone charger is broken and it would be cool if there was something i could put over it so that it is no longer broken.

Iphone chargers are stupid expensive for no reason, no serioisly you can get any other kind of charger for chaper than a lightning cable, but thats not my business.

Anyway, here are a bunch of pictures of my charger because for “security reasons” I was not able to upload the nice video made, and the only other option you gave us was a “bunch” of pictures.

Also, here is a link to this exact charger on amazon, so if its possible to make this part for less time and hassle than it would take to ge this charger, then i think it will be a success, which seems easy enough because this charger is “currently unavailable”???? https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Lightning-USB-Cable-Certified/dp/B010S9N6OO

Honestly, I hate 3D modeling. This section sucks. But Fusion 360 made it suck a whole lot less. Also, the fact that I didn’t miss any classes for this section probably helped. So here are my mediocre models.

The first one we did was this cube, which you walked through with us so you know exactly how we did it. I don’t know what material it is but now that I look at it, its pretty ugly so thats cool.

So this is the lamp shade. It’s ugly. I wouldn’t put it in my house. But it meets the requirements. I also had to find this squiggle on google because Mac doesn’t have a paint option.

Here is my flask. I am 99% sure I did it wrong if we look at it in any other angle it would be wrong but this is the angle I screens hotted so we may never know.

These might actually be the ugliest of all sunglasses, but me being the person I am, I can’t get them to look better and they resemble sunglasses therefore I think I did what I had to do. Also I don’t know what happened when I tried to screenshot it so please don’t judge.

In chapter 10, the first section is about Virtual Reality. I think VR is something that can really boost education for instances such as going on adventures and exploring things they otherwise would not be able to, such as volcanoes or touring cities. I remember going on field trips in elementary school to Saint Augustine, but for students that could not afford the trip, they missed out on a really cool experience. However, in such a situation, if the school has VR technology, students don’t have to leave their schools to explore these super cool forts and such.

The digital divide has a major impact on school success. The podcast explained that students that have more access to not just computers and internet, but also up to date software, are more likely to succeed better in school. Causes of the divide can include socioeconomic status and even location, such as the example used in the podcast where one student lives in a rural area and having internet access at home is not normal. As a teacher, I would try to assign as little homework that needs internet access at home as possible, as well as get in touch with students and parents to see how I can help, and if there needs to be any special circumstances taken into consideration, such as letting a student use a computer more at school, or offering them to write a paper with pen and paper instead of typing if they needed.

I commented on Sheighlin’s and Jennifer’s posts!

Alright well this is my giving up journal. I worked on this assignment, the one with the tutorial for a total of 3 days and I literally couldn’t make the program work. I would click a button and nothing would happen and then I would do it again and nothing would happen. I worked on this assignment for the past 4 hours and I got so fed up that I uninstalled the program from my computer twice and I still can’t get it to work :(. I ended up inputting a zero for this assignment in my grades as a what-if score and I still have a C and that’s passing I think so I think if I end up with that i’ll be okay. plus we have another assignment due next week and I think ill do good on that cause i’m already farther on that one than I am on this one.

So uhm yeah that my journal. Please don’t public shame me for this. I will actually cry. Please fail me in peace and I promise I will do better on the next one.