Up until this week, the theme of our class has been prototype, prototype, prototype and with each of our prototypes came a whole new series of questions, problem solving, and total confusion. We have had both major successes and slight setbacks, but overall with each new version of our raptors we have learned something new by always keeping in mind a certain word.
“I haven’t been on a dinosaur making team…YET. I don’t understand how to make a dinosaur robot… YET. I have no idea how to make skin from scratch…YET” The word “yet” gave us license to freely experiment and also fail gloriously because we had no idea what we were doing at the beginning of the semester, but that was ok.
This is the week that all of our ‘yet’ statements finally became things of the past! Our class is going into hyperdrive mode because the time has come for our prototypes to transform into the real deal.
This Monday, December 4, with be the first time we see all three raptors fully in action because we have a giant fitting scheduled with all of our performers present. With this fast approaching deadline, each of our teams took a good hard look ad our to-do lists and 1) probably had tiny heart attacks and 2) really focused in on what exactly had to be done, step-by-step, in order to complete these raptors.
Here’s a little insight as to how we went about this process… 
Some of our major to-do list items included:
-crafting and cutting out three pairs of hands and feet
-last minute ‘skeletal’ construction on raptor #3
-3D printing teeth and claws
-Finalizing the layout of LED wire elements and figure out last minute connections
-adding skin the raptors
-constructing heads and figuring out eye/teeth placements
-and the list goes on………
Even with our extensive list I am happy to report that a lot of our ‘to-do’ post-its have made their way over to the ‘done’ section. Of course, our biggest obstacle is time and there are certain aspects of our dinosaurs that cannot progress until other elements are complete first so we still have a lot of work to do before our final raptor unleashing (Monday December 11 at 9:15am) but in the meantime here are some lovely process shots of some of the things our team worked on this week:
We aren’t at the finish line, YET, but these raptors are so close we can taste them!
