Learning Beyond Measure

This past week has definitely been my favorite thus far! I have learned how to use Solidworks, 3D print, and laser cut. I’m so excited to spend the weekend practicing my newly acquired skills at the OEDK. Aside from learning these new skills, I have been busy as usual. Nonetheless, I am enjoying every second of every day.

Research, Research, and More Research

On Monday morning my team spent our time tying up the loose ends of our research. We looked into several aspects of zip lines such as background information, details that govern the issue at hand, existing solutions, and business perspectives. Though this may not sound like much, these are simply umbrella terms for the abundance of research that we conducted which ultimately became a nearly 70 page document. For reference, my team created a Design Context Review (DCR) Mind Map which can be found below. Fair warning: you may be overwhelmed just by taking a glance at topics we looked into! We ended that day with a presentation of our DCR Mind Map and identified points of confusion that we failed to notice before.

Home Runs and Hot Dogs

Tuesday was much more than a simple day of work. The day was spent identifying design objectives such as safety, durability, comfort, range of motion, and ease of set up. We also defined design criteria for each objective. Design criteria may be explained as established standards for our design objectives that should be met; otherwise, our device is not as efficient as it may be. Surprisingly, we spent the entire day working on design criteria as we wanted to ensure our goals for our device were clearly defined before jumping into brainstorming.

Later that evening, about half of us set out to the Astros game against the Pirates. To be completely fair, I spent the entire day practically dreading going to the game. The first time I had ever went to an Astros game was late 2018 and that experience definitely sits at the top of my list of Most Boring Experiences in My Life.  The entire time I was stumped trying to figure out what was going on and why the game took so long. In spite of that, I actually had so much fun at Tuesday’s game! It was $1 hot dog night and I finally figured out how baseball is played out. The Astros definitely gained a new fan that day. I’m already looking forward to the next game I can make it to (which is actually next week!).

Deconstruction!

Wednesday was spent presenting the design criteria we put together, deconstruction, as well as brainstorming. Last Friday we ordered a stadium chair from Amazon in an attempt to learn more about how the back support could adjust to different angles. We took apart the chair once it arrived and discovered that the mechanism we hope to learn more about next week is a ratchet hinge. Taking apart the chair was much more enjoyable than you’d imagine! This was an eye-opening experience for me as I had never thought about how seats like this are typically manufactured. This gave us new ideas to include in the brainstorming process.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

🧠⛈️

As far as brainstorming goes, we spent Wednesday afternoon and ALL of Thursday brainstorming full and partial solutions. We struggled for quite some time as we felt like we had hit a bump in the road and a majority of our ideas were nearly identical to one another. After much discussion, we realized there was a significant number of ideas that had never even crossed our minds. We are hoping to have screened and scored our brainstormed solutions by the end of today so we can head into next week with final solutions ranked and begin the best part of the engineering design process — prototyping!

Check out our first team photo below. Catch y’all later!