A very short week for MVTHS, with only 3 class days due to a district wide Professional Development Day on on Tuesday, and the celebration of Veteran’s Day on Friday. Despite the shortened work week, students were still able to make good progress on their projects.
Junior Nate Matarazzo continues his work on his video game project. He is using Unity to create the actual game, and will then be developing hardware for playing the game. He writes about his current work on the project on his website:
This week was cut short due to Election Day, and Veterans Day, which makes it a 3 day week. I finished the level design on the mini-game feature, and I finalized the movement system. I also added a hit box to the scoreboard, so the ball doesn’t phase through it if someone shoots a duck, and the ball reaches the scoreboard’s area in the game. Furthermore, I fixed a few bugs in the game, including one where the scorekeeper would count a made basket twice if it bounced up back through the hoop after a made shot. Adding on to this, I added a 0.5 second delay between steal attempts, so players don’t just mash the steal key-bind to steal the ball. I also added an RNG to dunking the ball, so there is a probability that dunks don’t go in. This probability can be edited for each version of the script in the inspector, so different playable characters will have different probabilities for things like: shooting, stealing, ball handling, and dunking.
I also updated my GitHub repository.
See more at his website, click this link.
Senior Nate Hopper made progress on his chessboard project this week. He writes about recent updates on his website:
This week, I finally created a 3D model of the chessboard, similar to the prior specifications that Josh used in his own version of the chessboard. Details such as slots being 1.33 inches apart, and having side pieces holding up the top, but I expanded on it by having the side pieces wrap all the way around and connect with each other for a bit more structural stability.
I also had to add a hole into one of the side slots so that I could poke the Admin circuit board through so I could actually have the chessboard plugged in when it is being used.
I then spent a whole day cutting the whole chess board out of cardboard, fit with holes in the bottom to slot in threaded inserts so I can mount the circuit boards inside of the board.
It was after I did this though, Mr. Christy pointed out that I had a lot of wasted space inside of the chessboard so I recut the sides of the board, along with the holes at the bottom of the board since they were a tad too small.
With that, the design is finalized, and now I’m working on getting the circuit boards sent off.
Read more and see photos at his website, click this link.
Sophomores continued work on CAD tutorials in the buildup to their LED Light Box project, which begins after the Thanksgiving Break. The CAD involved in that project will require making hardware, PCBs, wiring, and design documents all within the CAD framework. It’s quite a task, and that does not include the coding or circuitry side of the project. Looking forward to what they will be able to create.
MVTHS Engineering 
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