The second week of SEED has blown by pretty quickly.Started the week off with a workshop on the use of various tools in the OEDK. Most of the tools i had never used before so this was both fun and educative and we had very good Teaching Assistants (Grant and Adulfo) who basically eased the whole process. Most of the RICE students had also used the tools before and so they threw in some pointers as to how best we could them.
On the following day,i and my fellow teammates (Majdah,Clement and Colbin) proceeded to make our low fidelity prototypes for Luna’s proposed enrichment device. After we had thoroughly analysed our designs and learnt a thing or two from them, we proceeded to make a medium fidelity prototype. Originally, we wanted to use car tires in making our medium fidelity prototype but after an hour of trying to fit tires we found outside, we settled on making one with cardboard,tape and a PVC pipe. After we had completed the prototyping,we proceeded to test it,though the tests where limited since the material we used would have easily been damaged if we put it under some specific tests e.g The Clean-ability test wasn’t feasible since water damages cardboard.
We continued the tests on our prototype, performing kick,balloon and drop tests to check its safety. The prototype proved to be very safe and it did the job it was required to do very well by making sure Luna’s feeding time was extended to 52 minutes and proving she had to work for the food. We Proceeded in the afternoon by making our final presentations on the Zoo project and they were successful.
On Wednesday, we were all assigned to our respective teams that we will work with on a summer long project and i was assigned to The Ring the Decibels team. Besides myself,the team comprises of Dylan Rivera, Clement Misomali and Audrey Yao and these are incredible guys to work with. In brief,the project requires us to design a device that alerts users of the OEDK if the levels of noise in the kitchen are above threshold.The project was initially developed by first year students here at Rice, our team is looking into improving it and putting it into full use. And so,we didn’t waste much of our time but buried ourselves into research,reading everything we could find on the Project and that’s how we ended our Wednesday.
Today,we begun the day with a team meeting where each team described their progress so far,the problems they encountered, what they propose to do to solve these problems and what they will do on that day. After the meeting, we have been back to research and as of this afternoon,begun 3D printing some of the designs we found in the research documents that were left by the first year team.
In summary, it has been a very interesting week in which i have learnt a lot and am more excited of what is to come.