Thursday 31 May 2018

9NE art - Favourite pieces.

This term our 9NE art module we have been doing some piece of art. We have had three different assignments. Our first assignment was to start shading. We did this through drawing 3D shapes and then shading them depending on where we put the source of light. I have drawn a cube, pyramid, sphere and a cylinder and then shaded them to show the shadow. Mine looks like this:



Our second piece of art was practicing perspective and how to draw things so that they look realistic. I have drawn a few cylinders to show what dog food, baked beans, and spam looks like.

Our second to last piece of artwork was to make a helpful robot out of 3D shapes and make it so it is helping someone. This is the fridgebot-2000. It helps people by giving them food when they need it. People told me that it looks like karen from spongebob so I pu plankton in there to add to the fantasy. The fridgebot is walking down the street to find people who need food to give it to them. I have mostly included cubes in this drawing and a couple cylinders for the neck, arms, and legs. Also I have used some have spheres as feet/shoes

Thanks for looking at my art!!! 😃


Wednesday 30 May 2018

Robotics and Programming

In my Robotics and Programming class, I am learning how to use my programming knowledge to design my Mars Lander.

DESIGN PROCESS
For the brainstorm section of the design process we put forward our design ideas that we had individually thought out and designed. Then we tested out the sphero and figured out how it worked and how we could incorporate it into our designs so it makes a Mars Lander. Once we finished testing out the sphero we went on a site called the Mars Lab. On this site there were three different landers that we could drive online. We had an online tutorial on how to make them move and how to pan their cameras. The first one was called the MAMMOTH. It had four hydraulic legs that stretched out quite far. It had a tiny camera that worked relatively well. This rover was probably one of my least favourite because it was so big and didn’t get over the rocks that well. It also didn’t have any renewable energy source or storage. This made it bad for the atmosphere on mars and couldn’t carry anything if you were controlling it from say a rocket. The second one we used was called the MAWSON. This was my favourite out of the three that we got to choose from. Instead of four wheels like the MAMMOTH it had six. Although the legs weren't hydraulic they had better grip and stability. The camera was bigger and clearer and was easier to control and it actually had some storage. My favourite thing about this lander was the solar panels that it had on its back. This meant that it had a renewable energy source and would be able to go for a longer time that the MAMMOTH. The third and final rover was called the CONTINUUM. This was the one that was in the middle for me. I didn’t hate it but I didn’t love it as much as I liked the MAWSON. It had a glass backing for storage this means that it could be shattered easily if say a dust storm swept up and took a few rocks with it. This rover had six wheels like the MAWSON but they were very stubborn and did not look like they would be moved easily without taking the whole thing apart. The camera was on a movable arm that could basically point in any direction and it also had a few pockets of storage. It had a source of energy like the MAMMOTH but the rest of it makes up for it being the second best. These helped me form ideas for my own rover that we have to make.

My design would be a mixture of all three of the rovers. It would have six wheels and they would be hydraulic. The tires on them would be thick and sturdy enough to go over big rocks and wouldn’t break. It would have a camera like the CONTINUUM so you can see everything. It would have storage like the MAWSON and CONTINUUM combined. It would have the energy source of the MAWSON because I would like it so it does not hurt the atmosphere of the planet mars. Then it could have some additional features. A grabber if you find something interesting that you would want to research or say a light so that you could see what you are researching.

Here is a video of my mars lander that I created on Tinkedcad and below that is the image of the one we made in real life out of LEGO.




MARS
Mars terrain is, dusty, rocky and quite like a desert. Mars rusty dust is because of the iron-rich materials in the small rock that litter the surface of mars. The cold thin atmosphere means that liquid water will not stay on the surface for a long time. Craters are aplenty on mars. This means a constant risk for the rovers of falling into them and them smashing. The red planet is also home to the biggest volcano and the biggest valley in our solar system. The mountain (Olympus Mons) is about 3 times the size of Mt Everest and the valley (Valles Marineris (named after the marineris probe that discovered it in 1971) goes 6 miles down. Also the gravity on mars is over half the force of earth's.

Our rovers should be sturdy enough to survive a medium sized fall, The wheels should be able to go over jagged rocks, and not get stuck in sand like materials. It should also have an engine that can get it up large hills and be able to go down sharp slopes. I think it should also contain some kind of secret thing that it can use like a drill or a grabber arm. It could even contain some sort of jetpack type thing so it can get over rocks and large boulders that it cannot drive over.

USING JAVASCRIPT WITH SPHERO
JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. It was originally made by Brendon Eich at Netscape, which was one of the first internet companies which built a popular in the days of dial-up internet. It was originally named ‘Mocha’ by the founder of netscape, Marc Andreessen who is now one of Silicon Valley's most famous entrepreneurs. Nescapes started working with Sun Microsystems. Who developed Java, which is a popular language that powered apps on early computers and cell-phones. Both companies wanted to create a plugin so that existing java apps could run natively inside the increasingly popular web browser so they wouldn’t have to rebuild it. So Netscape creates a scripting language similar to the java syntax (Syntax is the rule set for how programs are constructed) so that these apps could still be used and all the Java programmers could adapt quickly without learning a completely new language.

The language was also very powerful. Before javascript. Most of the web paes were constructed entirely from HTML and CSS. This means they were quite bland. JavaScript allowed pages to be more colourful and dynamic, they made web pages able to have animations and use playback media. How to use JavaScript. JavaScript is a case sensitive program. This means that if you even have one capital letter where there isn't meant to be a capital letter, it could ruin the whole program and make it harder for you to do what you want to do. There are also different types of cases. Camel case, Pascal case, spinal case and snake case.


CODE COMBAT
Today we have been learning to use JavaScript on our computers via Code Combat. Code Combat is a free game to use and play on your computers that teaches you the basics of coding with different code languages, Python and JavaScript are two of the languages that you get to use It hasn't been super easy but still hasn't been super hard either.

Here is a video of some o the coding we had to do in code combat:




Wednesday 16 May 2018

Graffiti - Art or Vandalism?

I feel graffiti is a good and bad thing. Graffiti makes things look good when it looks bland and boring. This can either make things look better or make things on that building look worse. If people don’t have permission to do Graffiti on a building they can be fined. If people tag the place that they are painting, people will inevitably get angry and I can see why people get irritated with it being on there building. It then takes money for the owners to remove it, money that wouldn’t need to be spent if someone didn’t destroy it with something that doesn’t look that great. People have reasons to hate Graffiti artists. In Leeds (which is a place in england) they have had to spend $250,000 - $500,000 on removing pieces of graffiti from the walls of buildings in the area. All added up that is a lot of money being spent on pieces of graffiti. That is a lot of money being spent on something that could be stopped. One example to prevent graffiti you could put motion sensor lights outside to scare the artists away. 

High quality art pieces are sometimes in the form of graffiti. They can either be really good or really bad. One of the most famous graffiti artists in the world is Banksy, his works of art are very political and show how he feels about the world at the moment. He has painted pictures about war and how technology is taking over the world. He feels that things need to change and this is how he expresses his feelings and emotions. Here in Greymouth we have an artist of our own. His graffiti name is Raja (I’m not going to mention his real name) and he does really cool art around the town. He has done murals, painted chromebooks for kids, and small pieces of art also. He does this to make Greymouth look better than it does. About two years ago he painted a massive crane on a building near the Grey river. Some people from the public think that it doesn’t look good, whereas others think that it looks really good. He has also done other things like a train near the hospital, some kiwifruit on one of those electrical boxes, and even some art for one of the local schools. 

The feeling about graffiti around the world is 50/50. I can understand both the sides of the debate, people don’t want their shops vandalised by pictures that don’t necessarily improve the business nor the look of the building. Whereas other people in the public think that graffiti is a good thing because it makes things look good and helps people to express their emotions. I feel that graffiti is neither art or vandalism because they are both at the same time. Most serious graffiti artists, who do major murals and paintings (like Raja), ask permission before doing there art. This ups the name for graffiti artists and helps them get a better following. In all honesty I feel that graffiti can be a good thing if you ask for permission and do it properly. When the people feel that it look how they want it, the artist gets payed and everyone is happy. My overall opinion is that graffiti can be a bad thing, but it can also convey a very powerful and political message.

We also made a presentation of some of New Zealand's graffiti artists, Here it is: