What I Learned Helping My High School Senior with a Physics Project
I’m publishing a little bit late today.
I had the skeleton of Egoless Programming #9 stood up this afternoon, with a plan to complete essay after helping my oldest with her physics project. It is based on an old MIT engineering competition called “King of the Hill.” You’re given a limited set of materials and some design guardrails, and you must build a self-propelled vehicle that will scale a hill while preventing an oncoming opponent from doing the same.
After we finished the MVP vehicle that’s due tomorrow, my brain was spent.
So I decided to watch the Chiefs win an insane overtime NFL playoff game vs. the Bills. And so here we are, publishing twelve hours later than I normally do. I didn’t want to do a rush job on #9, so we’re taking this detour.
So here’s a little intermission piece on what I learned this afternoon:
Translating a design blueprint into a manufactured device isn’t trivial. We came up with what we thought was a solid design in about an hour earlier this week. It took us about 4 hours (inclusive of two trips for supplies) to build our MVP.
Using a jigsaw is pretty fucking fun. Today was my first time. I could get into doing “hardware” projects sometimes.
Once again, constraints drive creativity. We had watched a few videos on mousetrap cars, and the most obvious materials for certain necessary features were not on the list (a list that appears from copyright to be circa 1990).
You must fully exploit your degrees of freedom. One of the key items on the materials list: “any metal fasteners (paperclips, screws, bolts, nails, etc.).” We got fairly creative with this one while designing the car’s frame and drive components.
Supply chains are a bitch. Swapping the very reliable Internet supply chain for software libraries to the currently struggling supply chain for consumer products as part of your build makes a limited supply list more limited.
Iterative manufacturing of physical products is just as interesting to me as iterative software engineering. We’ve moved from a design (with feedback), to an MVP vehicle (with feedback tomorrow), and will move to a final production product and competition in a week. It feels a little like XP!
