I hope you are doing very well… As I promised you last time that I would send you videos.. That is Salsa dance, which is somehow similar to our Manganje.. More videos will come later, I believe this is enough for a start.

You remember I shared with you something about Houston Zoo? Next time I will share with you about “RING THE DECIBELS“..

Don’t worry about Decibels, you can try to google what they are when you are free. For now let me talk about Team Tiger… So Tiger was the name of our Zoo Project Team. Do you remember what problem we were solving for the Zoo?

To begin with, Team Tiger was made up of three gents, and one lady, namely; Cordbin, Wilson, Clement and Mazda.

So we were working on extending the feeding time of Luna, a red-hog at Houston Zoo who eats very fast, and also due to lack of exercise, is overweight. Our goal was to design a device that would engage Luna into more activity before and during feeding time. We brainstormed over 20 ideas, selected six for screening and finally one was selected as an outstanding idea. When we meet I can share with you the 19 ideas which we left, for now I will talk about the one idea we worked on.

Tire Inception. 

This was an idea that we chose and worked on. The idea was that we should use two tires of different diameters. The smaller tire (24 inch outer diameter), inserted inside the bigger tire (28 inch) with a PVC pipe connecting the inside of the outer tire to the outside of the inner tire. The outer tire had openings through which pellets would fall out from.

We came up with a medium fidelity prototype which we used cardboard to mimic tire. The hog would have to roll or hit the tire in order for the pellets to come out of the openings, thus making the hog work for the food, and also extend the feeding time. In order to refill this feeder with pellets, the zookeeper would use the opening of the PVC pipe, which also has a stopper to prevent pellets from falling.

After conducting some of the tests including  durability test, we had our oral presentations where we shared to the whole class what we found out. We can now call this as the end of the “boot-camp”…

From the bootcamp, we have now started working on our summer Projects. We had project pitches! And have been assigned a project by the title “Decibel Destroyers”..

The idea behind this project is that we should develop a working device that would help the OEDK users by warning them when noise gets to some “unaccepted” level. So far we have had our first interview with the client to help us understand the problem better, and we are doing more research on sound, noise, light, etc and we have just placed an order of the electronic components which we would like to use for our project.

Oh, I will explain more on what this project is really about., for now you can call me a decibel Destroyer..

Pass my greetings to everyone there. Yes, I have missed nsima; but it is all well.