It’s been an exciting week reuniting with classmates and making new friends. I am very much looking forward to working with fellow Rice students and the international students from Brazil and Malawi to complete engineering projects. This summer, Kelvin (another Rice student in SEED) and I are living with the international students on campus. This means that we are there to help them live on Rice’s campus, get around Houston, go shopping, find interesting things to do on the weekends. I am very happy to be their resident mentor this summer so that I can become good friends with the students, understand more about their cultures, and do fun things with them outside of working at SEED.
To learn more about me, I grew up in Florida all my life, so the exhausting Houston temperatures and humidity are familiar to me. Last school year, I completed my freshman year as a mechanical engineering major. The internship started with no delay this week, and we have already begun working on an engineering project for the zoo.
MONDAY
On the first day of the program, we all met who we would be working with for the summer. After doing introductions and icebreakers, learning everyone’s name, and going over the schedule for the summer, we took a visit to the Houston zoo. At the zoo, we went on a scavenger hunt to look for miscellaneous animal facts. Despite nearly half of the animal information plaques missing, I still enjoyed seeing the zoo animals and bonding with the other SEED participants.
TUESDAY
The second day this week consisted of more introductory activities and presentations. The most memorable activity of the day was deconstruction. During deconstruction, three other students and I attempted to take apart an ancient, mysterious temperature regulator machine. For about half an hour, we struggled to just take apart the casing that held the electronics due to stripped screws. Once the casing was finally opened, we began pulling apart the electronics to understand how the device once worked. Though, after disconnecting the tubing to the coolant pump, an unknown liquid began dripping from the device. The liquid proved to be a problem when cleaning up after finishing deconstruction. But hey, at least we were able to open the outer casing.
Image 1: Deconstruction
WEDNESDAY
Wednesday began our engineering design boot camp, which basically means learning everything taught in the semester long ENGI 120 course (introduction to engineering design) in five days. Not only are we learning the process through workshop activities, but we are also working on an actual engineering project as we go through each step of the process. We traveled back to the zoo to interview a zoo keeper about the need for an enrichment device for their okapi. What is an okapi, you may ask? I had the same question when learning about this project too. Well, they are apparently the closest species related to a giraffe and have visual attributes similar to a zebra.
Image 2: Okapi at the Houston Zoo
THURSDAY
After conducting research on okapi enrichment the previous day and early in the morning on Thursday, we moved on to consider how to develop a solution for the okapi enrichment device. These steps involved creating design criteria for the device, prioritizing the objectives through the use of a pairwise comparison chart, and brainstorming solution ideas. It is now our task to reduce the multitude of brainstormed solutions into our final design solution.
Image 3: Morph Chart
Image 4: Brainstormed Solutions
To end this blog, I will leave this photo of Jeremy’s collection of 3D printed Kirbys. This summer, I am looking forward to use the 3D printer and other equipment at the OEDK.
Image 5: 3D Printed Kirbys