Design-Build Team: Izzy English, Ginny Hollingsworth, Alex Jacobs, and Taylor Pierce Our group began the Dancing Robots studio with conflicting ideas. Some members wanted to replicate the NBA player, John Wall, while others wanted to replicate a popular YouTube video called the Revolution of Dance. As a conclusion, our group decided that we could combine our two ideas. At the beginning of last week, our plan was to create a robot that resembled John Wall, but who would do the dance in the YouTube video. Our character in the prototype took a turn and ended up becoming a combination of several NBA players, instead of just one; however, we plan to make our final robot resemble just John Wall. For our final robot, we are planning to have it wear a John Wall jersey (that we are creating in Photoshop). This aspect of the appearance will create a more recognizable factor that will differ from our prototype. To express emotion, our robot will have built in LED lights on his jersey. The lights will be turned on when he is excited and dancing, and off when he is unenthusiastic and motionless. The robots eyes will also have the same effect to express even more emotion. As we learned throughout the process, all the dance moves done in the YouTube video were nearly impossible to recreate into our robots dance, so we had to choose carefully which moves we could recreate using a limited amount of servos and time. All of our dance moves which consist of the YMCA, Robot, Hand Banger, Jump on it and of course, the John Wall Dance, use the same, or similar servo movements. Our process in choosing these five movements was challenging because we were not familiar with building with servos, using their movements, or our restrictions using them. But, once we jumped that hurtle, we began building with cardboard and double-sided tape. After we placed all the servos in the correct positions and fed the wire throughout the robot we created, our team began to program each dance move individually. Our prototype was made out of cardboard, and we definitely learned that using this material was not the best choise if we wanted our robot to stay together through the dance. Our final robot is made out of plastic and held together by screws and wire. Currently, we are in the process of deciding which color to spray paint our robot and what other details we need to add to really portray our desirable personality for him. We have created about ten body parts out of plastic that have been put together to resemble an old school robot. Each body part is a rectangle that is attached with servos that represent joints. We believe that in the future, building a robot will be much simpler for several reasons. Throughout the process we have come across several different challenges, technical difficulties and team disagreements that we had to overcome. Next time any of us build a robot, or something similar to it, we believe that we will approach it with not only a more experienced prospective, but a more positive and endearing one. We also have learned so much about building with technology and programs that in the future, it will seem easier due to the knowledge we have gained through building our John-Wall-Bot. Our original plans were extremely ambitious, so naturally our end result was not everything we had hoped for and imaged. But as with anything, we learned that working our hardest as a team to create something we all imagined and something we all had the capability to endeavor made our end result, our robot, something to be extremely proud of. By Izzy English