Jen + Emma | Laptop cover | Failures!!!! (problems with soldering)

We had a lot of trouble soldering wires together. Neither of us had every worked with electronics or circuitry before, so it was very difficult getting certain wires and pins to stick together, presumably because of the materials we chose. When we put the circuitry in the encasing, the pin that connected from the Arduino to the breadboard with the button would continuously break off and need to be soldered again because of the small connection surface area. I think that the reason we had trouble was because we had wires that were too thick and needed to be wrapped around the pin rather than being soldered straight on. The solution to this could be shrinking tape to secure the pin and wires, but I didn't know that this existed...until today. My soldering is just a giant big mess!!!!