5. Painting Our Sea Toy

The only thing we had left to do now was paint our amazing toy. So we checked with our art teacher and came up for lunch one day. We did not finish painting it all but we got most of it done. We made the dolphin grayish blue, the shark gray, and the fish orange. We decide to make the sides and back a light blue, but did not finish.
Since we had not been able to finish painting our toy in one lunch period, my partner and I came up for lunch a second time. The light blue for the sides and back was re-made to finish the parts we had not finished, but did not really match our old light blue color. But still, we tried to make it work as best it could. Then we worked on the waves in front of our toy and painted them a slightly darker blue, with dark blue lines to represent the waves. So now our toy is all built, painted, and ready to present. My partner and I are very happy about how the toy came out, we had our doubts in the beginning and we faced a lot of problems that could have stopped us, but we worked our hardest and made the best toy we could have. It was a ton of fun, even with all the ups and downs.

4. Small Mistakes, One at a Time

I was absent for a week, so my partner had to cut the pieces of wood out. We made a mistake when drawing the lines on the wood earlier though. The different pieces touched each other. So when my partner went to cut, the wood was squiggly, and even with sanding we couldn't get it really straight and we could not get the sizes exact anymore. But when I got back, we did not have much time, so we took what we had and started working on building it. 
Since we had used think wood and since our toy was pretty tall, we did not know if hot glue would keep it all together, but we tried it. And it seemed to work a little too well. It was then that we realized we made a mistake by gluing a piece of wood at the wrong angle. But by this time the glue had dried, so we had to use a saw, an exacto knife, and a ruler to pull apart the two pieces of wood.
When we fixed this problem after about 30 min, we realized another problem. We had glued a piece of wood to the front of the toy, in front of the cam and followers. This was a problem because we needed to see the cam and followers in order to determine if there was a problem with our toy. We eventually got this off too, with a saw, an exacto knife, and a ruler.
But this was not our last mistake, I accidently glued on the flat piece of wood to a rod and the shark to the same rod, meaning we could not put one side through a hole diving the top half and the bottom half. So we had to remove the glue from one side, insert it through the hole and then re-glue it, for the shark, the fish, and the dolphin.
The last problem we faced was with our cam and followers and was a two part problem. One part of the problem was that the followers kept sliding off the cams, so they would not work. After attaching three more pieces of wood to the bottom of the followers, it seemed to stay. But then we saw that since the rods holding the shark, fish, and dolphin were long, they seemed to more around and not stay in place going up and down. So we cut out three pieces of wood, made holes through them, unglued the shark, fish, and dolphin, glued the pieces of wood to the back of the toy, inserted the rods through the holes, and re-glued the shark, fish, and dolphin. Thankfully this was our last problem, and by the time we did this, our toy was working amazingly. My partner and I were very proud of what we had built.

3. Sketches

When we got to drawing our sketches we had thought out our idea more. We realized it would be easier if we made the shark, the fish, and the dolphin all go up and down. So we got right to work and started out technical and orthographic sketches, they seemed pretty easy, but they were not. They were time consuming and needed to be worked on carefully. We faced problems we did not see before, like how to draw what we wanted and where to put the crank. Also we had to decide the exact heights of all the different pieces. But when we had finished our sketches, they looked pretty good, not exactly perfect though.

2. Brainstorming

A few ideas we had thought of were an aquarium, a forest, and a park. In the aquarium, the shark would be swimming after a fish who was also swimming, and a dolphin would be going up and down. In the forest, the snake would be catching a mouse, and the kangaroo would be jumping. In the park, there would be a person running around, and a cat and a mouse would be jumping. 
After thinking these ideas through, we saw that we could not do the forest or the park due to it requiring more than one input, and being more complex. And to some extent not interesting for our target audience. So we decided on the aquarium with the shark, dolphin, and fish. The input for the aquarium was going to be a crank being turned. Since we were going to use cam's and follower's to make the dolphin jump, and the shark and fish swim, our project would be an example of motion transformation.

1. Introduction

In our technology class we were assigned a project. This was to brainstorm, decide on an idea, draw a conceptual and orthographic sketch, and build a working toy, that would keep a child in 1st grade busy for a few minutes. The requirements for the toy were, one input, at least three outputs, and to be constructed entirely of wood. We were given tools such as a saw, drill press, glue gun, and nails. Prior to this being assigned we learnt about a lot of different motion transmission and motion transformation systems in order to build our toy later.