As the title says, my name is Eduardo. I just finished my first year as a Chemical Engineering major at Rice. From all the classes I took I found that I particularly enjoyed my Intro to engineering design class. Getting a chance to work on a hands-on project, was extremely rewarding. It also allowed me to work on my collaboration, prototyping, decision making and critical thinking skills (we even got the chance to work on-site in Chiapas).
When I first applied to SEED I did so with the expectation that I would get to work on more cool design projects, and get to work with interesting people along the way. So far, the first week has failed to disappoint.
We started off with ice-breakers and a visit to the Houston Zoo! The question ball ice-breakers game made for some fun answers, while the walk to the zoo was a great chance to get to talk to other Rice students, and get to know the students from Malawi. After lunch, we had the opportunity to tell them about American university culture, and they told us about Malawi’s own university culture. It was very interesting to learn about the distinctions between the two, and to learn more about Malawi.
When at the zoo, do as the elephants
More orientation was to follow…we were given a tour of the OEDK and the tools available to us, listened to a safety presentation, broke into teams for a quick design challenge, and complained about the Houston humidity (it’s just terrible).
Moses (left), Aubrey (right), and I
The trip to the zoo was a lead-up to our first design project of the semester: a puzzle feeder for a red river hog. So far, we have interviewed one of the zoo keepers to understand the problem, done some research about red river hogs and some existing puzzle feeders, developed design criteria for our project, and brainstormed possible solution options. In doing so, we have also been reviewing the steps of the engineering design process, as well as some of the best practices for using decision making tools (such as pairwise comparison charts). Not only has this allowed us to brush-up on some of our engineering design skills, it has also allowed us to collaborate and understand our work styles.
Some quick notes from our brainstorming session
The puzzle feeder is intended to slow the rate at which a particularly over-weight red river hog consumes food. It is also supposed to encourage the hog to exercise more. However, the hogs are usually able to figure out how to most efficiently remove food from their current puzzle feeders, or break the containers in order to extract all the food with little work. Our current challenge is to develop a puzzle feeder which overcomes these limitations but remains affordable and easy to maintain for the zoo.
Over the next week, I look forward to getting to finalize our solution for the Houston Zoo, and getting to see what the rest of SEED has in store!