Computer Nerd
Recently I had the pleasure of participating in Warren Tech's annual Creative Jam. In the event, I joined a team of people studying various vocations at the school and we had to combine our skills into one large project. On October the 28th (I think) we formed our teams. However, a snowstorm resulted in very low attendance the following day, so the Creative Jam was delayed until the 18th of the next month.
Combining our skills was the first difficulty our team faced. Though the team primarily consisted of students from the STEM program, a student from Graphic Design and another from TV/Video Production had also joined. I myself was part of the Computer Science program. Eventually, after a long period of deliberation, we decided that the STEM students would build a robot. Since the theme was still "What Are You Afriad Of," even though it wasn't going to finish on Halloween anymore, we decided to build a scorpion.
As someone with no knowledge of Robotics, my goal was to use my web design skills to create a display about the scorpion, which the TV/Video student would create a video for.
I had suggested that, in order to make the display more interactive, the robot should communicate its status to the display. After completing a simple two-panel design for the site, programming that took the majority of my time on the second of the project. This unfortunately turned out to be a waste of time, since the team working on the robot itself could not figure out how to configure an Arduino to communicate during the day. Instead, that night I used the second slide on the website for a slideshow of information about the project. This kept the display interesting while simplifying the work required.
On the third day, the rest of the team managed to partially complete the robot. The video for the display became a building timelapse, and my work consisted of adding these to things to the webpage and filling up the extra space remaining.
As time ran short, several corners had to be cut on all ends. We finished the contest with about 7% of the vote, with the winning teams being an empty table people voted for as a joke, a team that had created a short horror film called "Birdman," and a team that had put together a scary installation containing eight synchronized displays of different things one could be afraid of. I personally voted for my own team and for the horror film.
You can find the online part of it (no interactive PHP included) here: Beware the Untitled Scorpion