Busy, busy, busy!

After such a busy week last week, I spent this past weekend relaxing, working out, and catching up on my Netflix. On the other hand, this past week has truly flown by!

Prototyping galore

Monday was spent finishing our high fidelity prototypes for our mini-project of creating an eating enrichment device for a Red River Hog at the Houston Zoo. The goal of this project was to familiarize ourselves with the engineering design process. We were also joined by two additional international students from Tanzania, Esther and Novath.

Prototyping is definitely one of my favorite parts of the entire engineering process! During this time, we have the opportunity to create small-scale prototypes of our brainstormed devices using anything we can find in the OEDK. For example, the OEDK has a cart specifically for prototyping materials such as styrofoam balls, construction paper, legos, and straws, to name a few. You can only imagine the possibilities that are crafted!

Ballception 

Tuesday was a bit more busy. We spent the morning throwing on the finishing touches and completing testing of our prototypes. My team created a device that was essentially a ball within a ball. A smaller, inner ball contained food pellets and holes which these pellets would have to escape from. Once being expelled from the smaller ball, the pellets fall into the larger ball and as Luna, the Red River Hog, rolls the ball around, pellets fall to the ground through holes in the larger hole. Though our final prototype was only made of duct tape and cardboard, it worked just as we had hoped! By the end of the day we were able to put together an entire presentation and present it to our peers in just a few short hours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reaching new heights!

That day, we also learned about four different possible projects we can spend our summer working on. Teams were revealed the following morning.

I will spend the remainder of SEED as a team member of Zipline4All alongside Andrew, Aubrey, and Chisomo.  Andrew is also a rising sophomore at Rice while Aubrey and Chisomo are international students from Malawi. We have been tasked with creating a harness for Camp For All, an organization that provides children of all abilities and conditions with the opportunity to experience summer camp activities just as able-bodied children can. One of their most popular activities for campers is zip lining; however, their current harness devices are nearing the end of their lifetime and are rather uncomfortable. Thus, my team has established a primary goal of creating a device that can comfortably accommodate campers of all sizes, abilities, and ages. Because this project is a continuation of one that originally started out as an ENGI 120 project, there is currently a device that was created last semester. However, this device has several issues as it is too rigid, heavy, and lacks proper support. By the end of this summer, we hope to meet our primary goal and implement our device at Camp For All.

Looking forward

The past couple of days have been spent heavily researching existing solutions, business perspectives, and different conditions that campers may have. Who knew there was so much information about zip lines out there? Despite the long hours spent researching, I am looking forward to being able to apply all the new information I’ve learned in the upcoming steps of the engineering design process next week. In just two short weeks I have learned SO much about the international students from Malawi and Tanzania. I have loved getting to know each one of them a bit more everyday. I’m so excited to explore Houston with them in the coming days!