Spartan Speedway Individual Blog

During this week's meeting, every group did their first official presentation. This lasted for the entire duration of the class. It was interesting to hear about the concepts and ideas that the other teams were talking about with regard to improving the Spartan Superway. Dr. Furman brought up the idea of using another piece or two of aluminum to keep the connections aligned, we will probably look into this further later on.

This weeks meeting began with trying to watch the prerecorded video by Dr. Okamoto which was related to the first paper we have to write for our senior project. With our attempts to play the video producing little success, we went into short group presentations regarding our revised project proposals. Afterwards, the teams broke off into our own separate meetings. As the small scale track team, we took a few pictures of the track which are to be used in next week's presentations. Other than that, the small scale teams as a whole continued to discuss design specifications for the future.

This week we were finally able to meet our small-scale track coach, Kevin Brasil. He gave us some insight on how the senior project works like funding and scheduling and such. He also told us about what the team tried to accomplish last year and their reasoning behind the choices they made. In addition, Kevin gave us some ideas on how to move forward and improve the track and things to start looking into specifically, such as costs and budgeting.

This week, we prepped for the lightening talk by making a short PowerPoint. We didn't do so well with the assertion/evidence method and I feel like we could've included more images and slides so that would be something to note for next time. Other than that, we listened to the other presentations and further discussed our plans for the year.

Not a whole lot happened this weekly meeting. Personally I spent most of my time getting to know my fellow classmates, particularly the other members working on the small-scale aspect of the project. I also spent a portion of my time listening to what the various advisers had to say about the different aspects of the project. My small-scale track project group also briefly discussed our initial thoughts and ideas concerning the track and what our future plans and goals are.