I was surprised at how challenging this project was to make. I spent all weekend working on it until it was near completion. Then on monday I continued to work toward making the finishing tweaks and realized that it was not working so I spent the next two days working on it all day and night long, past sunrise, I even ended up missing two of my other classes because I was working on the project instead. It was really challenging to get the gears to work with the poles that are pushed up, because they instead would try and move around in a circle with the gear rather than be pushed the direction I wanted, so I had to create a new edge for the gears to smooth them out so there is less friction, as well as create a deeper hole for the poles to stick through to insure they go the right direction, and create another boundary to stop the poles from sliding and lastly used a string to pull the poles in one direction so that they do not move with the motion of the gears. There was a lot more debugging than I anticipated and at times I thought it would never work and wanted to abandon the project and try something else. In the end I was not able to use the hand that I initially created, which was made out of plastic tubes, because it was too rigid for my platform, nor was I able to use the second hand I created, which I made out of museum board, but I ended up with a third hand made out of card stock so that it was light enough to be moved by the moving sticks. In the end though I am happy that I got it to work and think that the mechanism is really cool. That is what initially drew me to doing this project in the first place, I wanted to pursue a design that involved making a mechanism that transforms one type of motion into another, rather than just sticking a motor to something and making it spin, and I was successful in doing that. I think what is most important is really the time I spent making endless tiny tweaks to my mechanism to get it working to the best of my ability. I learned some ways that I could have improved it that I would not have thought of, and I solved issues that I never anticipated occurring.