Tri State Area

This was my first time doing Makerspace for an elective. I’ve been in the Makerspace before I’ve just never taken it as an elective. I used to paint on the wall. I created the “Nether portal” from Minecraft around the door to the storage room, but since we are moving locations I am no longer working on it because I can not take it with me. This year I worked on making stuff for the small business I created on my own. I crochet stuffed animals and sometimes even clothes. So during my Makerspace time, I’ve been crocheting away. I made a lot of stuffed animals and I am getting ready to sell them in my Etsy store. If you would like to know more about my business please come talk to me! 🙂

I was the main designer for our webpage, meaning that I spent a lot of time figuring out how to use a grid layout to position everything on the web page with CSS. I started by drawing out what I had imagined each of our pages to look like, and those drawings ended up shaping the design of the whole website. I spent a few days learning how to make drop down menus. I faced a lot of difficulties with using the code I found online, because I had to distinguish between all of the different drop down menus. I had to look through all the code and try to understand what it was doing so that I could know what to change between menus. The other thing that I worked on was gathering profile pictures from students, and editing them so they looked good on the website. Otherwise I helped out a little bit with all of the coding, like fixing bugs with the student directory, and making the search bar easier to use. Hopefully in the future we will be able to add directory information from our school’s directory, and make the drop down menus go to pages that list the students in each grade. 

https://soriki.com/makerspace/2022/03/31/world-wide-technology-fulton-icebreaker/

Will’s Interim makings

This week in the maker space interim I learned how to use the vinyl cutter and the laser machine. With the vinyl cutter I made the stickers shown above. This was really cool to make and also very cool to see the laser and vinyl cutter machine.

I finished making country outline ornaments for my mom. Each ornament is a country she has visited. I found outlines of the country on Google Images and formatted them for the laser cutter, adding a circular cut out at the top. That took a long time, as the countries all have messy borders. Finally, I cut them out on birch wood and tied a piece of red ribbon through the circle.

For this quarter I spent most of the time working on a laser engraving of the Old Course at St. Andrews Golf Links in Scotland. This is one of the most famous courses in golf and it was the first golf course ever made. I played it in October of 2021 and I decided to make something to commemorate that. The main goal with the laser was to capture the detail as the old course has 112 sand bunkers and also to capture the contours of the fairways and greens. The laser is the perfect tool for this and it is really cool to see the detail engraved so cleanly on a piece of wood. Below are the two pieces I made with the engraving on them.

This program was started in my math class but was quickly transferred to the programming elective that I am in. In the elective, I was able to not only complete the programming but also test different theories by running the code (this can be seen below my print statements with a “#” to symbolize notes without affecting the code). After the initial outline was taught, I had free reign to finish and organize the code how I pleased.

This type of programming is object-oriented. For this reason, I was able to create a class that had multiple functions to solve basic quadratic math. Since all the functions are within a class, in future cases, all one has to do is “call” the class and will then have access to the functions. An example of calling a class is demonstrated at the top of my second file where I called the “ProgrammingElective class” that I had just created. This made it possible for me to print direct functions without having to rewrite all of the code.

The way that I tested each function was by creating an additional file that held all the “print” statements so that I could clearly decipher which function I was calling and what exactly it was calculating without having to read in between code.

The first sheet of code is the class itself.

from vpython import*

class quadratic:
    def __init__(self, a, b, c):
        self.a = a
        self.b = b
        self.c = c

    def zeros(self):
        d = (self.b**2)-4*self.a*self.c
        if d >0:
            z1 = (-self.b + d**0.5)/2*self.a
            z2 = z2 = (-self.b - d**0.5)/2*self.a
        else:
            z1 = None
            z2 = None
        return (z1, z2)

    def min0max(self):
        x = -self.b/(2*self.a)
        y = self.a*(x**2) + self.b*x + self.c
        return (x,y)

    def min0maxidentity(self):
        if self.a < 0:
            return ("minimum")
        else:
            return ("maximum")

    def slope(self, x):
        y = 2*self.a*x + self.b
        return y

    def y(self, x):
        y = self.a*(x)**2 + self.b*x + self.c
        return y

    def corddistance(self, x1, x2):
        y1 = self.y(x1)
        y2 = self.y(x2)
        cd = distance(x1, y1, x2, y2)
        return cd

    def linedistance(self, x1, x2, x3, x4, x5):
        cd1 = self.corddistance(x1, x2)
        cd2 = self.corddistance(x2, x3)
        cd3 = self.corddistance(x3, x4)
        cd4 = self.corddistance(x4, x5)
        ld = cd1 + cd2 + cd3 + cd4
        return ld

    def linedistance2(self, x1, x2, dx):
        ldt = 0
        for i in arange(x1, x2, dx):
            x1 = i
            x2 = i + dx
            ld2 = self.corddistance(x1, x2)
            ldt = ld2 + ldt
        return ldt

    def slopecord(self, x1, x2):
        y1 = self.y(x1)
        y2 = self.y(x2)
        sc = (y2-y1)/(x2-x1)
        return sc

def distance(x1, y1, x2, y2):
    y = ((x2-x1)**2 + (y2-y1)**2)**0.5
    return y

This next sheet contains the print statements as well as the notes.

from ProgrammingElective import*
from vpython import*

q = quadratic(1, -2, -3)

print("zeros of equation =", q.zeros())

print("min and max of equation =", q.min0max())

print("min or max identity =", q.min0maxidentity())
#used calculas to make quation for function
print("slope of equation =", q.slope(4))

print("distance between points =", q.corddistance(-2,3))

print("line length of curve =", q.linedistance(-2, -1, 0, 1, 2))

print("total length =", q.linedistance2(-2, 2, .00001))
#did not use calculas
print("slope of cord =", q.slopecord(3.999, 4))
#the following are results for the "q.linedistance" function
#11.089724298507356 - 1 (dx)
#11.224464159058982 - 0.1 (dx)
#11.226015942633229 - 0.01 (dx)
#11.226031459417593 - 0.001 (dx)
#11.226031614584913 - 0.0001 (dx)
#11.226031616156195 - 0.00001 (dx)

#the following are results for the "q.slopecord" function
#3 (x) - 5
#3.5 (x) - 5.5
#3.75 (x) - 5.75
#3.9 (x) - 5.900000000000002
#3.99 (x) - 5.990000000000023
#3.999 (x) - 5.999000000000748

In the maker-space interim I wanted to laser a yugioh card. First I got a image off the internet and put a hairline line around the image so the laser would cut it out. Then when it was done cutting out it was very dark and the image was blurry. So I asked Doctor Urbano if there was a way I could make it better. First I changed the image from colored to black and white. Then I adjusted the brightness and the intensity to make it lighter and turn out better. Then I printed it out. I learned that if you want something to turn out better on the laser making it lighter will help with making it better.

2nd