We have finally finished scoring our solutions, which means that we have officially chosen a design for the new-and-improved casting stand we are going to build! Although the Huggable Pillow solution (which I explained in better detail last week) won the Pugh Scoring Matrix, we contacted our client and he told us that he would prefer us to build the Hybrid Design, which combines the Huggable Pillow Design and the current solution by allowing the patient to choose to either stand chest-first and wrap their arms around the pillow, or they can stand with their back to the backrest and use the armrests to support themselves. By choosing which position makes them more comfortable, the goal is for the patient to be able to support themselves for longer.

So to better explain our idea to our client (and to work the details out ourselves), we sat down and drew it.

And then, because we’re engineers and drawing the design wasn’t good enough, we built it.

And because that still wasn’t good enough, Alex made a CAD model of it.

We are beginning to do more practical research and medium-fidelity prototyping of our project to determine how exactly we will need to go about building out prototyping stand. So while Alex built the CAD design of our project and while I put together the PowerPoint for our design proposal, Liz and Blessings worked on prototyping various components of our device. They built a low-fidelity version of a weld-in pull pin, which is a pin that can be pulled out of a hole, moved along a track, and then put securely back into another hole to proved adjustable support for a device. Although we intend to buy the weld-in pull pins for our final device, it was informative to see how they are built and how they work. Liz and Blessings also have sewing machine experience, so they also sewed together a test cushion out of wood, foam, and vinyl for the patient to use to support themselves while their leg is being cast. It was an excellently-made test cushion, and it proves that we can definitely produce the cushions for our final device.

Our constructed weld-in pin	This cushion looks almost professional!

Today, we gave our official design proposal to our professors and the other students in this internship to show off the work we had done. It was interesting to hear other people’s ideas and questions about our project, as well as learn more about what my friends are working on. Although I was fairly aware of their projects from hearing from them in morning meetings and hanging out with them on the weekends, it was super interesting to hear the formal design proposal with pictures and a more professional explanation.

Speaking of hanging out with the other SEED employees on the weekends, a large part of this internship is spending time with and getting to know people from other cultures, as well as showing them ours. As a result of this, a large group of us get together every weekend to do something new in Houston. We just had a 4-day weekend for July 4th, so we spent a lot of that time hanging out and narrowly overcoming disasters.

Kelvin and Manuel are obsessed with biking, so they invited us to join them on Critical Mass, a monthly (and I quote from their website) “casual bike ride starting from downtown Houston and going wherever.” This is where alarm bells should have started going off, but they were allayed by the next sentence, stating that this is “generally a slow-paced ride where persons of all skill levels can participate.” Okay, cool. I wasn’t doing anything Friday night, so I decided to join them. It was a lot of fun to go biking with my friends, and it was  incredible to see the literally thousands of bicycles taking over the road, but we were definitely biking in a line AWAY from the city center. When we stopped at a Seller Bros 13 miles from Rice, that’s when we knew we were in over our heads. People hadn’t eaten. We were almost out of water. And we were only halfway done. But we kept going because there really wasn’t anything else we could do 7 miles away from the metro line. We lost Manuel. Kelvin and Caz lost us. Alex biked ten miles on a flat tire. We were separated from Christina and Luis and Alex, so we waited for them across the street from Minute Maid Park at the exact same instant that people started leaving the Astros game. We tried to go through the Jack-in-a-Box Drive Thru to get water, but we gave up and went across the street to a gas station where Luis drank 2 Powerades in 5 minutes. Twenty-six miles later, we finally made it back to the metro line and took it to IHOP, where we locked our bikes to a fence and hid them with vegetation because there were no bike locks, the waitress looked at me weird when I ordered a Belgian waffle with ice cream, and Kelvin downed four Splashberry sodas in the span of an hour.

I am definitely doing it again next month.

On Monday, the U.S. students decided to throw a Fourth of July party for the International students, so we went shopping at HEB (a Texan grocery store) because we intended to bake them American dessert. So we walked into HEB with the intention of only buying the materials for our baking escapades, but walked out with the supplies for an entire dinner, including turkey burgers, extra pulp orange juice, and MagicShell caramel sauce because A), Magicshell is cheap and B), MagicShell is amazing. We went back to my house to bake food because I actually have a decent kitchen, and we baked food, which, because we are us, was way more fun than it should have been. I had a recipe for chocolate chocolate chip zucchini cake that I wanted to try, but when Alex saw all the zucchini I was putting into my cake, he just started calling it chocolate salad. Christina and Manuel attempted to make vegan flan, which went about as well as it sounded, and Kelvin wanted to look good in a tight t-shirt, so he mixed his peach cobbler by hand.

The next day, Alex and Kelvin longboarded to my house to pick up the desserts they left the night before, and we began the arduous journey of carrying three desserts (including the still very liquid vegan flan) the 1.5 miles from my house to the dorm where we were throwing the party. We made it maybe 100 yards before I got tired of spilling flan all over myself and we called a Lyft to take us the rest of the way (don’t worry, I used a beach towel to shield the nice driver’s car from the wrath of the flan). It was too hot out to party outside liek we had originally thought, we did like true Americans did and we celebrated the Fourth of July indoors with air-conditioning, stove-cooked turkey burgers, chocolate salad, and billiards. Although we did attempt to go to Hermann Park to listen to the symphony and watch the fireworks, there were so many people that we were struggling to hear the music and balance on the hillside, so we just went back to Rice and watched the fireworks from the top floor of one of the dorms. But we didn’t leave before getting a picture together!

Although we didn’t have the most traditional of Independence Day celebrations. we did the best we could with the resources we had, which if you think about it, is kind of the definition of engineering. Everyone had a good time at our makeshift barbecue, and it was a ton of fun to show the international students this part of American culture, just as it is a ton of fun to hear about theirs.