The past month of engineering has been jam-packed with well... engineering. Every day for 3 weeks we worked tirelessly on our Animitronic project producing something very special and slightly dangerous. Our catapult or what some would call a trebuchet was capable of launching candy 6 feet for safe retrieval by any trick or treaters. Dubbed Maximilien Robespierre because it tended to try to decapitate any team members who try to get near it, the catapult stood an astounding 2 feet tall and was over 3 feet long. While I am proud of our final product, What I am most proud of is how our group was able to cohesively work together and focus on each other’s strengths. This taught me a lot about working within a team and engineering a real machine whilst also documenting and marketing it. That's not to say everything went well, of course, we had difficulties and hick-ups along the way. For example not using vex components was a misstep because we were trying to use non-standard fan motors which have poor startup torque and this caused problems in starting the lifting process. We ended up having to swap the motors for Vex ones on the last day and this led to us barely scraping together a program that worked with the motors. These problems however are invaluable given the up-and-coming year-long capstone project in which we will solve a real-world problem by designing a gadget or machine. Now that I have this knowledge in the future capstone project we will make sure to think the design through and through before moving on to the building process.