by Dan McWilliam, Team Lead for Hack the House.

On Monday June 19th, our team for the Hack the House Challenge was joined by Katelyn from Beakerhead in the Makerspace to share our design and progress. Our team of grade 9 students is the youngest in the challenge and we are looking forward to seeing how we stack up against the teams from the University of Calgary.

The challenge is to design and create a sustainable vehicle out of a piece of household furniture. The vehicle will have to navigate an obstacle course tentatively scheduled to run in the Telus Spark atrium in September. https://sites.google.com/beakerhead.com/hackthehouse/home

Update:
– We have a rolling chassis and we are working on the drive train. The cordless drills will be our motors for movement and steering.
– We will have a solar panel charging drill batteries to acheive the sustainable part of the challenge.
– Our belt and pulley system has a lot of slipping and we are needing to iterate the design in some way, or our vehicle won’t move.
– We are also needing to redesign the driver’s seat, as the drill placement makes the cockpit very tight.

The School Year is ending and our time to build has run out. Some of our team members are moving on to different high schools and we hope to stay connected and see them at the event in September. We hope to have a few hours in the fall to figure out the motor and drive issues, as well as the driver’s seat. We wish we had a little more time, but it has been great working together through many lunch hours to build our vehicle.