Hello,

I am Luis Felipe Moura da Silva, I am a Brazilian automation engineering student at PUCRS and one of the SEED interns. I arrived from Brazil last Saturday, so in the early days I had time to adapt(in my city, Porto Alegre, now the temperature is around the 50°F). I am living at Martel College, and the experience is pretty good, my roommates helped me a lot with the first steps at RICE.

Martel College

 

On Monday we visited the OEDK for the first time and we introduce ourselves, did some icebreakers, the international students visited the OISS and all students has visited the Houston Zoo. Our first week has been focused on learning about the stages of the Engineering Design Process.

 

On Tuesday we has started the day with some icebreakers, a OEDK and SEED overview and we received information about the safety regulations at the OEDK and RICE, what are the resources available at the OEDK and how we can access them. After in small groups we gave presentation of the culture of the countries.

 

On the third day we started the Engineering Design Boot camp, we will learn steps of the Engineering Design Process, so we learned about the first stage, Design Analysis Stage. After we started develop a project from the zoo. This project’s goals is to develop a enrichment device for the Okapi. We started by discussing the given problem and started researching.

The Okapi

 

On the Thursday we started use all the knowledge in this project, did the brainstorming, discussing more about the problem, defined the design criteria, apply the decomposition and work with our teams, my team is the Team Tiger.

Some steps of the project

 

I’m very excited for the next week and the next project! ( And also to make the prototype)