It’s the first week of January so that means it’s time for online challenges. This is one of our favorite weeks of the year because it gives us a chance to let our creativity run wild and be even more goofy than we normally are.
This year, both Chase and Landon decided to make their entries over the top in their own ways.
Chase entered the Make It Real Challenge because he loves designing products in CAD. Instead of creating something simple Chase chose to build a differential swerve drive… because why not?
His final product was super intricate and extremely detailed. It ended up requiring 14 separate pieces and a LOT of printer time.
We have no idea how the judges will view it because it turned out amazingly cool. But Chase made a couple minor mistakes in his measurement so it doesn’t spin the way it should.
Regardless, it was a lot of fun and we learned a bunch of lessons through working on this project.
For the Theme It Up Challenge, Landon decided to turn our field in to an energy production factory. In the world we created, Spin Up is a contest between competing sets of factory workers to see who can generate the most energy in order to earn a promotion. Some of the ways the workers can generate the energy is by putting batteries (disks) into the storage areas (high goals) and by harvesting it from the solar panels (floor tiles) at the end of the night.
This is always one of Landon’s favorite projects of the year because it’s the one time when he gets to produce and direct a movie-style video. (Although, we secretly think he only likes it because he gets permission to tell everyone what to do for a couple days. Lol)
We feel like the video turned out well… even though there is a noticeable lack of googly eyes and smoke this year. Hopefully Landon will be able to up his game in the special effects department next year.
We also submitted an entry for the Promote Challenge. We didn’t go quite as crazy with Promote as we did with the other challenges, but Landon still added in some cool transitions and it has a great message. As a whole, we feel like it turned out really well!
You can never tell how the judges will view these types of contests, but it doesn’t really matter all that much. Regardless of the outcome we are very proud of what we created and we can’t wait to move on to our next project.
