Hello,

My name is Carlos, and this is the first time that I’m blogging!! I’m a Brazilian student from Porto Alegre, my major is Electrical Engineering at PUC-RS.

I arrived here in Houston on Sunday (June 11), on that day the weather was really HOT (as the next days). I had just left my home town, Porto Alegre (Brazil), and it’s winter in there, so the temperature difference was  really high. But over all the weather is not so different from the brazilian summer, rainy and hot. When I got at Rice I was a little lost but after some help I was able to find my dorm. The dorm had a lot of nice Gifts from them.

My first day of SEED at the OEDK was great, all of the participants were able to know each other, doing some activities, and understand more deeply the program. In the end of the day we went to a scavenger hunt at the Zoo, in there we were able to explore the Zoo and learn more interesting things about the animals. My team was the First one to finish the task, we were really tired after that, but it was really fun to do it.

On the second day we still had a more deep dive on the program and then after that we started the Boot Camp, that is an introduction and explaining of the Engineering Design Process, the program is really different from the brazilian learning methodology, because in Brazil we have classes at night and usually they don’t give homework to do at home just some group projects during the semester, and during the Boot Camp we have videos to watch during the night and quizzes after that, and on the next day we practice what we learned. After the practice we were divided in teams of four and given the task to make an enrichment device for the Okapis at the Zoo. The day after that, so Wednesday, we went to the Zoo to make some questions to the zookeeper that we had made before going to the Zoo.

On the next days of the week we practice the engineering design process on the Okapi enrichment device, we had to define the Design Criteria for the device, do the Pairwise Comparison Chart, after the Decomposition, Brainstorming and the Morphological Chart. So now we are at the stage of trying to figure out the best ideas for the device.

So that was my blog for the first week of SEED.                                                                                                                                     See you Next Week!!!