Eng 198 and such

Well, it was a very crisp day yesterday. Cool and bright and windy. It's a real sign that fall has arrived.
Yesterday in the ESPL was kind of interesting. For Eng 198, we are working in groups to build steam powered cars, and the last day we could work on the car was yesterday. So we started off pretty well; all we had to do was paint the wheels and assemble the car. Vince, Pete, and I started on the assembly while Matt and Sean worked on painting. The paint job on the wheels looked flippin' sweet: kind of a red and black deal. The rest of us were able to assemble everything except the front wheel, which was still drying (spray paint is kind of tricky to work with). Everything was running smoothly, until Matt discovered that the soldering of the spoke plate onto the front wheel was coming off. So he soldered it again. Later, when we spun the front wheel around its axle, it teetered like crazy. So Matt and Sean went to work on the front wheel by (I think) widening the hole in the spoke plate so that the hole in both the wheel and the spoke plate lined up. Since we had an extra wheel and extra sheet metal, I went to work cutting out a new spoke plate for the new wheel, just as a backup.
When we tested the fixed front wheel, it worked quite well. As a precaution, we put glue around the tips of the spoke plate, just in case the soldering came off again. We also added a super-sweet fin. After everything on the car was assembled, we spun the turbine to see how fast the car would go. The front wheel moved alarmingly slow. Although it seemed like this would be a problem, the TA who was at the lab assured us that the turbine would move very fast, thereby quickly propelling the front wheel.
We were actually one of the first groups finished with our car, which says a lot. We've hit so many roadblocks in the course of this project: locked cabinets, lost cameras, broken wheels, misplaced holes. I'm glad we were able to address and overcome these challenges.
We plan on working on our report on Sunday, but I'm definitely looking forward to testing how the car runs. It should be exciting!
Last night, I did some of the assigned readings from "Back of the Napkin" and watched Dr. Goldberg's lecture on the things we can learn from the philosophers of Athens. I have to say, even though both were informative, I feel a little out of place when I read them. "Back of the Napkin" tells of numerous experiences with companies that need assistance, while the lecture talked about how to creatively make a new product or new category of product. That's all well and good, but I don't really understand how that applies to what I'm doing. I'm a freshman in college, not a CEO or leader of an R&D team. I don't really have the technical skills to back up new ideas, either. I'm not saying that the ideas and skills that both the lecture and the book address aren't important; far from it, these skills are essential! But it does lead me to wonder, if we're going to teach these skills to college freshmen, is there any way that we could make these skills more pertinent to college freshmen?
That's about all the pithy insights I have for today. Until next time, keep your stick on the ice.