After receiving some background on object manipulators and accumulators, teams of student designers must now determine a mechanism to grab ONE of the game objects from the challenge outlined in Unit 5.
To accomplish this, one must use an engineering process known as BRAINSTORMING, which was described in Unit 1. Brainstorming is an exercise in which groups of individuals work together to generate large numbers of ideas.
Some important rules for brainstorming:
- When brainstorming, teams focus on the quantity of ideas generated, not the quality. The premise is that from lots of ideas will come a few great ones!
- Reserve judgment. There are no bad ideas during the brainstorming session, because even the most outlandish concept could inspire someone else to come up with something great.
- Record everything. Student designers should document all the ideas generated during brainstorming in their engineering notebooks.
Activity:
- Using brainstorming, determine many ideas to grab ONE game object. Record all ideas in your engineering notebooks.
- Choose the best three concepts from the brainstorming pool and sketch them in your engineering notebooks.
- Choose one manipulator concept and design it in Autodesk Inventor or build it out of VEX components.