Hexaflexagon

Orange, purple, green, orange, purple, g-- wait, how many sides does a piece of paper have? Why are there three colors?? These are hexaflexagons... a term I have heard every sixth period for the whole school year because my math teacher is obsessed with them.

There are some other fun videos that demonstrate why exactly these work, and some with even more than three sides! Check them out:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIVIegSt81k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paQ10POrZh8&t=4s

 

My math teacher also decided to have fun with this (as if these are not already fun) by showing us these funnier videos on hexaflexagons (warning, video four may cause hunger):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmN0YyaTD60

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTwrVAbV56o

Toast this out!

Can you guess what this is?

 

 

This is a project from Engineering II in which I had to redesign a toaster, and disassembly/reassembly was one of the steps. I put it back together and it still works! I also had to test every aspect of the toaster so I used force probes (for the lever), heat probes and took a qualitative approach to how it toasts bread and these are the results:

 

Just for Fun

I have always wanted a t.v. in my room, and now I found a way. As I was looking for DIY projects online I found how to make my own movie projector, and it works great. I did some simple calculation to figure out the distance the box had to be to project the image from my phone properly onto a wall. This projector uses a magnifying glass to enlarge the image, but it plays the movie as if it is mirrored. Here you go!

Excel Fun

Over one of the breaks we had during the school year, I made an excel spread sheet to help me figure out what classification a certain shape on a grid is. In this example, I made a square, a kite, and then a parallelogram, and the chart on the right tells me what shape I have from the coordinates I plug into the upper left.

Shirt or Scoreboard???

We had this project in my computer science class, where we had to help society in some way by building something. My group decided to help world wide obesity. It was basically a shirt that had a scoreboard on it, and it detected when you catch a ball, so it automatically increases the score. This helps kids by getting the 20 minutes of daily exercise that they need, and it prevents them from fighting over the score. My group actually prototyped this shirt, and used LED's as regular digital numbering system for counting, and we used an ultrasonic sensor (left) to find when the ball was caught. All in all I got an A on the project, but what matters more is that we could help the society.

Rube Goldberg

The past few weeks I have spent on making a Rube Goldberg machine to work. This complex machine is all for simply cracking an egg. First, someone knocks over one side of a seesaw, causing the other end to lift. Once that is lifted, the pulley it is attached to knocks over a balance on the other side. That balance knocks over a different balance which unbalances a third balance (lots of balances here, keep up with me). When the last duct tape is rolled off the edge, it starts rolling down a ramp, where it hits another piece of duct tape. That tape is attached to one end of scissors, which cut once the tape is off the ramp. The scissors cut some string, which allows an egg to drop into a strainer. Only 3 eggs where harmed in the process of this... And one for baking cupcakes while we were setting up.

Sparki Duino

The last unit for my Engineering class is programing little Sparki Duino Robots. After all the frustration and attempts, I finally got it to use its infrared sensors underneath to follow a line. Basically I told it if it detects the white line on all three sensors, then move forward, but if it detects it on the left sensor, then move left, and right if it detects the white line on the right sensor. This was a series of three if statements. For those of you who don't understand - coding is how I did it. I hope you enjoy my video, and I will show you more soon!