Creative Engineering with Mark Rober

• "How to build cool stuff and get people to care about it"
• Monthly class with Mark Rober
• Will end up with 3 builds

Storytelling

• Mark Rober always makes builds motivated by great stories
• How do you make a video go viral?
  • Make people react
  • Strong emotions
    • Laughter, sadness, outrage, etc.
  • No one shares videos they don't remember
  • Story-driven development

Engineering Design Process

1. Brainstorm
2. Research
3. Prototype
4. Final Build

Brainstorm

• Process:
  1. Scenes
     • Where might you interact with the theme?
  2. Problems
     • What problems do you encounter in the scenes?
     • The more relatable the problem, the more it'll resonate
  3. Solutions
• When picking your problem/solution:
  • Is it relatable?
  • Is it inspiring to you?
  • Is it plot worthy?
  • Does it fit the constraints?

Research

• Helps you stay organized and see the entire design space

Part One

• Find the requirements of your project
  • Constraints
  • Helps you focus your energy
  • Adds structure for you to solve problems
  • Can break them up into essential and non-essential
    • Some things will be out of scope but still worth capturing
• After you have requirements, you want to dive deeper into each of them and build them out
  • Look are examples in the real world that might have parallels
    • E.g. Mark Rober used grain silo patents to build his liquid sand hot tub
  • Talk to friends and family
    • Collaboration always brings great ideas
• Keep track of experiments you'll need to perform as you go through the process
  • They will help drive your build
  • Science experiments that'll help guide your build
• Keep your ideas broad
  • Think big
  • You can explore the ideas later as you develop your build
  • Don't worry about things that are difficult/near impossible

Part Two

• Narrow down the potential approaches to your build
• Answer any open questions you had
  • Do your science experiments
  • Great addition to the story behind your build
  • Process:
    1. Define your question and variables
       • Test what happens when you change your variable
       • Test one thing at a time
    2. Get the materials
    3. Run the experiment and measure outcomes
    4. Analyze your data and form conclusions

Misc

• Formula for determining speed based on iPhone slo mo
  • $\frac{5.4 \times distance(ft)}{slo mo time} = mph$

Resources

• McMaster-Carr
  • Great for figuring out what you need then taking that to Amazon to find cheaper options
• Pololu
  • Motors and electronics

Class Learning