Hello! I’m back to report about my 2nd week as a SEED intern! This week marked the end of our little boot camp and the beginning of our summer long projects! This has been a week of both very exciting ventures so lets dig in!
The first 2 days of the week were geared towards finishing up our Tapir Enrichment Devices and then reporting back about them. Monday was our sole day of prototyping and so Dr. Wettergreen started the day of with a fun, little prototyping workshop. This workshop dealt with designing a transportation device now famous in the my home city, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, out of raw materials for low fidelity prototyping. Through his experiences in Addis Ababa, Dr. Wettergreen helped us understand that raw materials are really just any materials made available to you by your environment. I felt very proud of my home city as Dr. Wettergreen shared accounts of the recycling efforts there
the JACK!!
however I was a little jealous that Wettergreen got to ride a Bajaj (however unsafe they might be) before me and I was raised there. We were then put into groups to go ahead and prototype our miniature Bajajs to go down a zip-line with the added objective of keeping our passengers, two ping pong balls, safe inside our Bajajs post-collision. Me and my team designed the “Silver Lightning” which despite keeping our passengers safe, came second to last in time trials. The work shop got our gears turning as me and my team
Silver Lightning Miniature Bajaj!
for boot camp were then able to build our prototype for our enrichment device: the Jack! As detailed in our presentation next class, our Jack prototype was able to integrate holes for Browse and pellets for feeding purposes and opening for brushes for a tactical element for a fully enriching experience!
Fueled with excitement we were then able to begin our summer long projects on Wednesday. With boot camp over we were now Back to Reality and ready to apply all we learned to our big projects. This also meant that I was back to Reel Film, my semester long project from ENGI-120. With new teammates and fresh ideas, I’m excited to see what we come up with this summer!