Engage and persist

Envision

Material exploration

Project Paragraph

Growth Paragraph

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Physical fabrication

Car Track Puzzle is a puzzle designed for an escape room where you input a code you get from a cypher on a poster, releasing a car down a track that flips flags that spell a name. The keypad works using an Arduino and four buttons labeled 6, 7, 8, and 5. The code for the Arduino uses an array to tell if the buttons are correctly pressed. For the track, the car starts at the top in a box with a flap attached to a servo. When the code is entered, the flap opens, releasing the car down the track. The flag-flipping mechanism uses a lever in the middle of the track attached to the same shaft as the flag. As the car passes over the levers, they flip down into the track, rotating the shaft and lifting the flags. This project is meaningful because it might be chosen to be part of an escape room, and solving the puzzle would give the people in the escape room joy and satisfaction.

My goals were to envision how my project would work in an escape room, engage and persist through challenges, explore new materials, and use physical fabrication. I chose envision as one of my goals because this was my first time designing something for a client at NuVu. I think I grew at this goal because I had to think about how my project would be part of an escape room and how people would interact with it. I had to engage and persist when I had to solve a problem with the car stopping when it hit the flag flipper, and I also had to figure out how to design it in Rhino. I explored new materials when I 3D printed the flag-flipping mechanism out of PLA and learned more about using Rhino, Prusaslicer, and the 3D printers. I also did a lot of physical fabrication this studio, ranging from lo-fi cardboard prototyping to laser cutting wood prototypes. Specifically, I learned how to make strong, lo-fi prototypes because I had to mount mine to the wall.