[scheduled:: 2025-01-16]
Prototype Testing
Links and useful resources
Concept summary and connections
- requirements discovery
- prototyping
- testing
- proof-of-concept
Our cardboard photogates are what's called a proof-of-concept prototype. Their only purpose is to prove that arranging our electronic parts as a gate will let us do what we're trying to do. But, once we've made the prototype are we done with it?
No! We actually have to test it.
Testing is an important part of the engineering process, in which you actually check to see if your design meets the requirements you identified earlier. Designing tests is a tricky business, because it's easy to miss the oddball things that happen in real life. The good news is that you can usually do more testing (unless you broke your stuff, which usually means you failed a test anyway...).
Examples
- How would you test a paper airplane design?
- What kind of requirements might it have?
- How would you check that the prototyp meets them?
- How can we test our photogate prototypes?
- Do they detect something passing through?
- How small or fast can the thing be?
- How soon can they be ready to take another measurement?
Media resources
- Youtube search for "requirements discovery"
- Youtube search for "prototyping"
- Youtube search for "testing"
- Youtube search for "proof-of-concept"