Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Day 6: Second day of class and sitting in on a robotics competition

Today was our second day of class at Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW)! We got breakfast at the Mensa at 7:15 a.m. and made sure to get to our classroom by 8 a.m.
Today was our second day of class at Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW)! We got breakfast at the Mensa at 7:15 a.m. and made sure to get to our classroom by 8 a.m. There we started our day off with a riddle to wake our brains up, and then did a quick demonstrative assignment.

The task at hand was to create a duck out of eight Legos—everyone was given the exact same set of Legos, and had two minutes to finish. The purpose of this was to show that even though we were all given an identical task, not one of us ended with the same product.


The rest of the morning was spent in our project groups, where we started planning out the design of our robots. After a few hours, we went and ate a delicious lunch back in the Mensa!


The group project designing continued after lunch until about 4:30 p.m., at which point we went to watch some ZHAW systems engineering students partake in a robotics competition! They had been preparing for this competition for an entire school year, and the goal was to create a robot that could traverse over a gap between two adjacent platforms. Every single robot in the competition was able to accomplish this feat, and one of them was even able to do it in only 4 seconds!


Once the competition was over, we all went and ate sausages and chatted with the systems engineering students before heading back to our hostel in the rain. There, we relaxed in the lobby and played some cards until it was time to be off to bed!



-- Will F.