Designing A Mars lander

Design Process

In the video they were talking about how NASA is trying to make engineering fun, more enjoyable and getting kids into it at a young age.

The stages of the engineering design process are ask, imagine, plan, create, test and improve. Ask is where you ask others for input, suggestions to make it better and as for what you have done wrong over what you need to add in. Imagine is when you have to think outside the box and go bigger and bolder, add color and cool designs so that is better than your last design. Plan is were you plan out what you have made, what you have to improve on and what you have to add on. Create is where you start to create your design from paper, a computer or lego into a real life object, where you start to see things that you need to fix and improve on and things that you have done well that your not gonna change. Test is where you test your project to see if it has worked, see if it works without anything breaking off, without anything making a weird noise or anything going wrong from your design. Improve is where you have finished your experiment and see what you have and need to improve on and take in others feedback on your project. Here is the link for youtube video

About Mars

• Mars is the coldest desert world, it is half the side of earth and it is sometimes called the red planet because it is red
• Mars has seasons just like earth. They have volcanoes, canyons and weather too
• Scientist want to know if there is any living things on Mars and if anything can or in the future
• The reason Mars in red is because of the rusty iron on the ground
• It is cold, hot and icy on mars

How we are using the Sphero

The app we used is called Sphero Edu, it is a highly technical app that uses numbers, letters, brackets and lots of other sorts of things to do coding with. We had to watch 5 - 6 videos about how to make a program and how to program our code and make it move in a square shape. It uses loops which are types of coding that repeat things and in this coding you have to repeat it 4 times. You have to write the coding from the video to the Ipad and then connect it to the sphero and make the square using the code. I think that this is a good way to practice using codes and writing them down before we make and finish our own mars lander I am going to move some of this code to make my mars lander move.

We have used javascript to help us design our sphero and help move it around and test it out. Javascript has helped my group be able to know that we have to make the wheel move and make them flexible to move in a square, it has also helped us know how big we have to make the border when the sphero fits in and how big it has to be. We had to try and find out how we had to build our chassey around the sphero and try to make it strong, able to move every way and turn and that it is stable.