The first week of my Summer Experience in Engineering Design (SEED) internship at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) has felt suspiciously like a summer camp. Our TA Caz has got the camp counselor look down, and we’ve visited the zoo twice. We even started the week with icebreakers and team bonding scavenger hunts and cultural presentations. These activities have a purpose, of course. Our small group of eight Rice students and three Brazilian students is going to be working together for the next 7 weeks and learning about the engineering design process. That includes 5-6 weeks full time collaborating in a group of three or four people on a longer term project. Luckily we have a practice round, a dry run for learning the steps to solving a problem- zoo projects! Hence the surprise zoo trip.
The first day was pretty chill – we started at 9 am for once, not the early 8 am start of the rest of the internship. I haven’t had anything this early since high school. We introduced ourselves and tossed around the question beach ball, then covered some housekeeping. The Brazil group needed IDs so Caz and Sammi led us all in a group to the police station (see: summer camp). We headed over to South Servery for lunch, and later I had my first experience ever playing MarioKart while the Brazilian cohort was busy with an orientation. Then we all walked over to the zoo and went on a scavenger hunt culminating in a cheesy joke. See? Summer camp.
It wasn’t until I got home that I looked at my pedometer- 22,000 steps! We’d walked 8 miles over the course of our day. Shoutout to Caz for taking us around the wrong side of the zoo.
The eight miles(!) of walking we did on Monday.
Since we hadn’t done anything too messy on Monday, the second day I wore glasses and nice shirt… wrong call. We jumped into a decomposition lab, lugging junk machines into the OEDK and taking apart the copy machine (and engine, for others) piece by piece. I spent the whole lab pushing up my glasses plus safety glasses combo, and thankfully avoided getting printer toner on my clothes. We took the plastic skin off of the copier and revealed a mother lode of screws, screws and more screws. Luckily we had no requirement to put any of it back together, because this device was clearly not meant to be gutted and reassembled.
All of us, screwdrivers in hand, coaxing apart the copy machine.
On Wednesday we started Boot Camp, learning/reviewing the engineering design process, and concurrently began our mini project with the Houston Zoo. We met the tapirs there and Melody graciously showed us around all the enrichment devices they use with these prehistoric relatives of the rhino.
Our friends the tapirs: Moli and Noah.
Right now I’m slightly dead from the SIX video playlists and quizzes due last night, covering everything from pairwise comparison charts to user defined scales. I can’t imagine how the Brazilian students are keeping up with this much new (to them) information! But we have some brainstorming going on the tapir enrichment device and have gotten structure from the morph charts for some interesting combinations of bristles, ice, water and other elements.
Many ideas, but there can be only one final design…