YOU NEED TO FAIL! Jeri Ellsworth (whom I’m a big fan of because she is building her own pinball machine) has put together a fantastic video about the need to fail when trying to learn new things. Like she says in the video, I’ve never succeeded very well at the first time at anything*
So in that spirit, I would like to share some of the things that went wrong with putting together the robot(s) over 2 years.
- The candy dish this year broke about an hour into the day. I had a really tough time getting it to work in the first place, and drunks were far rougher on it than I imagined.
- Moving from switches to buttons. This was the first big change for 2010.
- Adding an ipod to the robot (2010). It wasn’t as loud as I would have liked, and got very little use throughout the day.
- Robot feet. I tried to make them out of cardboard, and came out more or less like flippers. I couldn’t walk more than 100 feet without getting into trouble, not to mention stairs.
- Half of the electronics. Whenever I ran into an issue, I have a tendency with breaking it more than I needed to and then having to fix more than necessary.
- When the candy dish was open, the hat light wouldn’t work and vice versa.
There are many more that could go on this list, but that is everything off the top of my head. I don’t consider these failures, but were learning opportunities. When breaking things, I had to figure out how to fix them (hence learning). Take 5 minutes to watch Jeri’s video and go out and try something. You might not succeed, but if you try enough, you will.
-Nick
*Ok, for some reason, I’ve actually been decent at water skiing and knee boarding on my first try. I have no clue why.
