Whenever I mention that I am taking a contemporary science class, I can see people spacing out and picturing horrible things, maybe they are remembering a horrible experience from high school or an experiment that went wrong; either way this is not how this class is. This class is rapidly becoming a really fun experience; I mean what else would you call a class that allows you to play with LEGO robots; yes, LEGOs. Being an electrical engineering student has given me the opportunity to do really cool things, but to be honest, nothing beats playing with Legos. I know what you may be thinking, what was the purpose of having student play with a LEGO robot besides having fun? Well, after building our 2 motor robot; we wanted to (for different time intervals) measure the distance the wheels travel and the speed at which the car travels.
We took these measurements through to different methods; manually, which involved calculating the diameter of the wheel, the distance traveled and doing some hand calculations; and digitally, through a software that gathers the data directly from the robot and displays the final and exact numbers on the computer. Below you will be able to see a table that has all of our results for 3 different scenarios:
As you can see we had 3 different measurements for each of the 3 time and power configurations. If you pay close attention you will notice that for the first configuration ( Time=3 seconds and Power= 75 Watts) the %error values are higher than those that we obtained for the other 2 settings. A %error is a calculation that we use to determine how off were our manual measurements from the real (digital) results. For the first scenario our measured values were off by 11.7%, 12.5% and 12.7%.These are high values for a %error. We revisited our measurements and noticed that the diameter value of the wheel that we used to calculate the circumference of the wheel was 5.5 cm instead of 5.0 cm. These 0.5 where the reason for our high%error values.Once we recalculated the circumference value all of our measurements were really close to the real values ; hence obtaining a %error <2%
From all this fun experience we learned a really good experience; sometimes we need to pay more attention to our measurements or actions; a small difference such as 0.5 cm could cause really big differences in our final results.