Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi! My name is Grace. I am in 5th grade and I am a serious soccer player. Me and my friend Stephanie just got our Science Fair Packet. we have decided to do a Dog Treat Dispenser. To do this we are going to set up an email account for my bulldog, Bailey. every time that someone sends her an email she automatically gets a treat and a Web Cam takes a picture of her and sends it back to the email address. We are doing this all with the Raspberry Pi. Do have any tips? Think it's a good idea? Do you think we are crazy? Please send me feedback!
Grace

Sounds a lot like the Judd Treat Machine. That's a big undertaking, but they've open sourced a lot of what they learned:
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/computers ... at-machine

The "email causes an action" part alone seems pretty interesting. Modern software engineers often use a development process called Agile. When they're working as an Agile project, they'll write down all the things they need to do on index cards - one task per card. So, for example, "Connect Pi to WiFi" would be on one card. They'll end up with a bunch of cards for a single project. Then, they write down on each card how long they think that task will take, and they backtrack - how many of these cards (or stories) can they do in the time they have? How many must be done first to have a usable product, even if it doesn't have all the features they want yet? Can they break it up into iterations so that they can deliver something functional on time, and maybe hit their reach goals in a second pass? It might be good to do a little planning early on as this is a pretty big project. -ER