| Macgyver and Alice |

Yes, on the outside Macgyver and Alice look to be a nice and sweet couple... but on the inside they are the projects that keep us from watching our favorite baseball team win the world series, the projects that persuade us to cancel another night of racquetball, and the projects that give me a reason to miss building Orange Effect. Who is Macgyver? Who is Alice?

Macgyver:

In our engineering class, we are divided into groups of four people. This group is given a "macgyver box" which is a box full of random shit¹ and then given something to design with it. For example, our first project this semester was to design something to make two mouse traps go off exactly 5 seconds apart from each other. There are several constraints, but basically no one could touch anything, so we had to design something to make the traps go off by themselves etc etc... Our project now is to design a vehicle that will drive 8ft and land in a 1-ft diameter circle. The vehicle has to pick up a playing card on the way and stop in that circle. Craziness. The worst part about these projects is that we have like toothpicks and shit to work with. We basically have a motor, 4 wheels and popsicle sticks in our box haha. I think our group is almost done though...

Alice:

Alice is a problem solving program that is used to teach students how to approach object-oriented programming before they take C++ . It's a huge Beta study on Virginia Tech engineering freshman (me) and we are indifferent towards this approach. Anyways, I have to make video game for my Alice project. I have to use this program they gave us and just make any type of video game with my group. We are making a Home Run Derby game and its really... kicking our asses as far as the code goes. It looks alright now though and I think we still have about a month to do it, so we are in good shape.

So Alice and Macgyver are really the two main things we are working on now in engineering. We are doing some MatLab stuff (graphing linear, semi-log, and log-log graphs using the program), but its really easy. I have an engineering test Thursday, but I really don't fee like studying for it. I will probably get in some study group come Thursday afternoon.


1. i.e. popsicle sticks, motors, wheels, metal, wood, nails, string, duct tape, hammer, pliers, etc, etc, etc...