This week’s been a trip.
But before i start talking about what happened this week let me talk about the brainstorming process we went through last week. We mainly used the hitch hiking method until we exhausted all ideas. One of our wild cards was to place leopard in the red river hogs stall so that it gets scared and it runs from the leopard thereby making it more physically active. Seems like an effective solution but not so feasible. On Friday we did the screening and scoring processes to identify the best project out all the ideas we came up with during the brainstorming process. We decided to go with the “digging PVC” as the best idea.
Now to talk about what went down this week. Week 2 of boot camp. The whole week we mainly focused on the prototyping phase of the design process. Firstly we were taught how to use some tolls in the oedk for prototyping. We were taught about the different adhesives used, the knives, hand drilling machines, filers, electrical jig saw and many more.
That’s me right there trying to use the jig saw.
Then we started the low fidelity prototyping to bring the “Digging PVC” to life. The idea was to hang a PVC pipe to the wire fence of the red river hogs stall. This PVC pipe would have 5 holes with 3 inch diameter. This is to allow the snout of the hog to fit through the hole. The PVC would be hang at a height of 4 ft so that the hog has to kind of stand on two legs and use its snout to dig the food out of the PVC pipe hence the name “Digging PVC”.
During Prototyping everyone was suppose to create a low fidelity prototype individually. After that,teams had to meet and discuss how to make a medium fidelity prototype. The low fidelity designs were interesting.
My design is on the right and on the left is Nneoma’s design.
From there, we moved on to the medium fidelity prototyping.
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After that we had to test for safety(sharp edges) using the balloon test. Then we went on to test for durability using the drop test.
On the left is Eduardo performing the balloon test and on the right is the Digging PVC after passing all 40 drop tests.
On Tuesday, we finished performing all the tests. In the afternoon, we had presentation about our projects in front of all the other rice interns, Dr Hunter, Grant and Adulfor.
Team Bear after the final Presentations. And that marked the end of boot camp!!!!
After that we had a presentation about the main project that we will be working on all summer. I, together with Chisomo. Alexus and Andrew will be working on developing a zipline harness to provide back, head and neck and support for kids with different muscular disorders.
On Wednesday, our team jumped straight into research about the previous designs. We setup the previous design that was made here in the oedk and tried to point the weaknesses.
Here is a picture of a me testing the device. We are still doing more research on the previous designs and tomorrow we will develop the design criteria and objectives.