1) What was the “Moneyball”approach that Billy Beane and Peter Brandt applied to the Oakland Athletics 2002 season? Was it an “art” or a “science”? What single statistic did they boil their value consideration down to? (In class research/discussion)
Billy Beane and Peter Brandt used a scientific theory created by Bill James, that they called they called moneyball. They attempted to find the most valuable players based on OBP. They adopted this method because the the Oakland Athletics very low payroll.

2) What is the equation used to calculate OBP? (In class research/discussion)
(H+BB+HBP) / (AB+BB+HBP+SF)

3) What is design? (In class research/discussion)


4) Describe 3 situations where movie characters (intentionally or not) applied a step from the PLTW 12 Step Design Process. Explain both the (a) situation as well as (b) how the step is relevant:
1 - Billy Beane used PLTW step one, define the problem. He did this in the scene in which he continues to disagree with the scouts in the room.

2 - .

3 - 


5) What is “Leadership”? List the three aspects of leadership that we come up with in class. (In class research/discussion)

1 - 
2 -
3 - 


6) Describe 3 circumstances from the story where a character exercised effective leadership:
1 - 

2 - 

3 -



7) According to the movie, what was the A’s record at the start of their winning streak? ___ : ___

8) What does this ratio simplify to (roughly)? ___ : 1

9) How long was the A’s record setting winning streak? ___ games won.

10) Given the A’s win/loss ratio at the start of the streak (listed two questions above), what are the odds of winning 20 games in a row? Run the numbers. (In class research/discussion)


11) Based on your calculation, do you think the A’s got lucky or was there something to the Moneyball approach?


12) Did Billy Beane strictly apply the “science” of Moneyball to his management approach? Was there an “art” to his efforts as well? Describe a circumstance where he broke from the Moneyball approach to make a positive change for the team.






Bonus Question (look into this if you’ve finished ahead of the class):
Money Ball was originally a book. What author wrote the book? What other books has this author written? Is there a theme to his writing?


It's "Oscar Season", will Moneyball win the Oscar for any of the categories it's up for?

Assembly Line Challenge

For Mine and Andoni's assembly line challenge project, we were to print the number "2" on the dice. Beause the numbers 2 and 4 are on opposite sides of the cube, we combined our project with the group that was to print the number "4" on the cube (Gustavo and Nick Robles). From there we worked together to make a machine that could print the numbers 2 and 4 on opposite sides of the cube, with a very high success rate that was able to print the numbers 2 and 4 on all six of the die. 

Here is a picture of our skethed design of our project:

How we solved the problem: We solved the problem using the Fischertechnik parts and the motors that are included. We used photoresistors and motors to the measure the light and with the values command the motors to turn and thus a red piece pushed the dice on both sides.


Here are the team challenges we got:
"Flash of Inspiration" - Brainstorm a solution for your section of the assembly line with a sketch. 
"If you Build It..." - Implement a solution for your section of the assembly line. 
"Proof is in the Pudding" - Implement a solution for your section of the assembly line that successfully operates with adjacent sections. 
"Round and Round We Go" - Iterate on your initial implementation. Explain the challenge you discovered off the first effort and what you did to overcome it. 
"Round and Round We Go... Again" - Iterate again on your implementation. Explain the next challenge you discovered with your design and what you did to solve it. 
"Leave no Trace" - Return your fischertechnik to their appropriate storage locations/clean your work space. 

My own individual achievements that I received are:
"Share It" - Provide feedback (Sustain, Change, Question, Idea) for another team. Who did you provide feedback to and what was it? We provided feedback with our surrounding groups (Nikki and Morgan, and Jon Henry and Nick Wiley), because we had to coordinate how our projects would be compatible with one another.
"Keep the Customer in Mind" - Your blog post is formated in a readable, professional manner. Writing is short and concise. Spacing is used to break up thoughts/concepts. Lists and/or bullet points are used as appropriate. No "monolithic" paragraphs. 
"Nice One!" - Identify a student from outside of your team that was most helpful to your efforts. Be specific about how they were helpful. Marco helped us with aligning the drop to transfer the dice to the following team.
"Helping Hand" - List a student that you helped outside of your team. How were you helpful to them? I helped Jon Henry get his part of the assembly line set up when he needed a lot of help.
"And the Winners Are..." - Recognize class participation by selecting one person other than yourself for each of our five activity awards (Initiative, Sportsmanship, Collaboration, Humor, ...what's the fifth one we have up on the board?!) Improvisation is the fifth one we have on our board. Initiative - Gustavo. Sportsmanship - Jon Henry. Collaboration - Nikki. Humor - Robles.


worked with Andoni on the blog

Machine Control Capstone Project

Achievements:

Marble Sorting (some achievments scored multiple times):Sort one marble (x1)
Sort two marbles (x1)
Sort three marbles (x1)
Sort four marbles (x1)
Sort four marbles (x2)
Sort five marbles (x1)
Sort five marbles (x2)
Sort five marbles (x3)
Systems (not including motor or piston used to charge your pressure vessel):Use one motor

Total: 9 out of 12 We were unable to use a valve because we were one short, so we used all motors.

Pictures:
1. Close up of the four motors that push the glass marbles.
2. Final project with Ryan in the background.
3. Unfinished project.
4. Program we used in RoboPro for our marble sorter.

Robo Pro Variables

Today we learned how to create programs on the ROBO Pro software that involve branches and variables. The variable tool is very helpful.

My program above turns on a light for 2 seconds.  This program keeps repeating until it happens 5 times total. The variable tool helped to get rid of unnecessary lines that made the flowchart messy.

Eng Program Investigation

http://ceng.calpoly.edu/

1)College/University of interest:
 - Cal Poly

2)Why does this institution appeal to you?:
 - I really like the campus, and location of the school. I also know that the school has a very good engineering department.

3)Which engineering program is most interesting to you and why?:
 - Aerospace engineering most interest me because since i was litte I jave always enjoyed learning about flying and airplanes. My family is full of engineers, my dad is a nuclear engineer, my aunt is a material engineer, and my uncle is a civil engineer.

4)Which undergraduate engineering elective is most interesting? Describe the course and its appeal to you:
 - The engineering elective of my choice would be again, aerospace engineering, like  I said before. Iwould also really enjoy taking other engineering courses, such as material and mechanical engineering.

Glider Challenge: Design Phase

Done with andoni

Glider Challenge: Design Phase

Our final design is the white and blue hanglider second from the far left.

2. 1) What's the challenge? The challenge is to build an efficient glider given the materials of some balsa wood, glue, and tissue paper.
2) Brainstorm solutions:
-What are the rules of brainstorming? (oxymoron) I'd say there are no rules to brainstorming; the only thing that would even come close to being a rule would be "nothing rediculous", but that would defeat the purpose of brainstorming, as brainstorming is listing anything and everything that comes to mind when confronting a problem.-List your ideas Hanglider, stealth bomber design, airplane design-Sketch at least two of them
3) Specify:
-Criteria Has to be able to fly, has to have wings, should be designed to achieve the most hangtime and distance, should be somewhat accurate
-Constraints (be specific about materials available) Only given a few materials, I don't know the exact amount of materials, but I could guess that we got about 3-4 square feet of tissue paper, and maybe a total of 1.5 meters of balsa wood, weight, must be hand thrown4) Develop Solutions:
-Sketch (with labels)

Bonus) Prototype with PaperWe made a prototype with the yellow plastic arms from the robo kits (picture of the prototype is included in my previous glider blog post).

3. As far as results go, our glider did pretty well despite our terrible and fatal test runs. We finished 3rd in distance and 1st in hangtime. If we did this again, I think we would defnitely change the wing size, as the stregnth of the balsa wood was not enough to support the massive wing size, and other groups with more of an airplane approach with smaller, more rigid wings seemed to work better than ours

woked with Andoni

Glider Blog

Glider Challenge

Before you're ready to "compete" with your glider, you probably want to try your design out and see how it goes. Use this format for collecting notes.

What did you learn from your test flight?We learned that our wings were too big and that the balsa wood frame was not as sturdy as we thought, and not nearly sturdy enough to support the size of the wings.

What are your goals for your glider and how will you adjust your design in order to help it better meet them? We will try to fix the glider, but I'm not sure that it will work seeing as almost the whole frame is broken in several places. Definitely going to be a hard fix if it's even possible.Here is an extensive gallery of pictures that were taken during the construction of our project:

:

We just tested our gliders today (April 8). Turns out, we actually did pretty well, we got first place in hangtime and third place in distance, which of course is much higher than I had ever imagined for our design, given how much it failed when we tested it last time.

worked with andoni