“‘What’s with the jungle-gym?’ It really had been something, fun and Martian-looking.

‘That’s the big one,’ Tjan said with a big grin. ‘Most people don’t even notice it, they think it’s daycare or something. Well, that’s how it started out, but then some of the sensor people started noodling with jungle-gym components that could tell how often they were played with. They started modding the gym every night, adding variations on the elements that saw the most action, removing the duds. Then the CAD people added an algorithm that would take the sensor data and generate random variations on the same basis. Finally, some of the robotics people got in on the act so the best of the computer-evolved designs could be instantiated automatically; now it’s a self-modifying jungle-gym’” (Doctorow 100)

Sometimes the best investigative technique is to just ask, as Suzanne does about the jungle-gym. During the CST lab observations, I took a similar approach to hear about classmates’ Blue Rabbit projects. Watching these groups of similar minded ideas form to collaborate reminded me of how the jungle-gym came to be, and I am excited to see what comes from it. I have finally decided to aim my project towards building a 3-D scan platform that will allow detailed 360 degree scans of small objects that can then easily be replicated. I want to take this a step further and try to duplicate a house key to test the real-life application of the objects we produce.