Our take-aways and what we learned from this project

One thing we learned from this project is just how important troubleshooting skills and improvisation play a role in transforming a design into reality.  Our initial idea was not as simple to build and assemble as we thought it would be.  On paper our project with the silly string shooter with an IR sensor seemed fairly simple and straightforward based on similar designs we saw on the internet.  It took some creativity to modify various parts to work properly. One example where we used a coat hanger that originally went inside the silly string cap which was supposed to rotate 360 degrees.  We found this didn't work well or reliably so we got rid of the cap and mounted the servo on a wooden block which sweeps back and forth rather than rotating completely around.  There were other obstacles we ran into with the coding we had some success using a potentiometer to activate the servo but we wanted the more polished design of the IR sensor without have to manually activate the servo motor.  

Overall we didn't have any major things to do differently (other than order parts from Dr. Sullivan early so we didn't have to pay for them ourselves).  We took from this that problem-solving and troubleshooting skills are fundamental to making any design project a success.  Undoubtedly these skills will be improved with more practice and hands-on work with Arduino and coding.