Hello Everyone,

Can’t believe it is already the sixth week of SEED time is flying by so fast. Next week is the last and am going to miss the OEDK, the staff, the workmates and the Huffs.

The Weekend

I had a great weekend going to NASA space center. It was the most exciting trip i have ever had in my life. It was an educative trip to learn about space. Before this weekend i thought Apollo was the first manned mission but America had other trials before that to survey space. It had so many interesting places to see and gave a really amazing feeling of what life is like for astronauts. I got to touch a moon rock, speak to a real astronaut, see and enter into a spaceship and do so many cool  things.

Monday, 15th July

As a group, we started the week on a great note. We continued on a prototype we had started making the past week. We made changes according to the feedback we had gotten from our collegues and supervisors. We made the seat longer and wider, found a way to attach the leg separation and connect the straps. We also decided to use a double layer on the seat for more support. Another change was that on the back of the seat we removed rods and instead a strap ran through. These changes were made to make the device more conforming to different heights and weights.

We made a very good prototype from fabric and a seat reinforcement of canvas (Waterproof). We also treated the wood to be waterproof.

This prototype was the first to hold more than 200 pounds without breaking and that was a very huge step for us.

Tuesday, 16th July

We spent most of the day planning ahead. This meant coming up with drawings of the harness device indicating dimensions, sewing patterns and sew ins. We had a challenge incorporating the sewing patterns into our drawings as there is no specific standard on how they make sewing patterns.

We also spent most of our time creating testing plans for the device that we are going to make and lastly we started planning on making of the high fidelity prototype.

Wednesday, 17th July

we started making our high fidelity prototype. By now our sewing has improved so much the work was so neat. We made it of canvas throughout, it is so strong and it was exciting making it.

Our greatest challenge was making sensible testing plans that are laid out step by step. This was so because we have to consider the users who are mostly disabled children and the people we had been testing on were our fellow collegues. We had help from our supervisors, teaching assistants but we kept changing things as some of the tests were not feasible.

we reached out to some parents that work on Rice campus to help us by bringing their kids to test our device.

Thursday, 18th July

Finished the high fidelity prototype and made iterations to make it as comfortable as it could be.

We were priviledged to get some parents that reached out and brought their kids and we started the tests today. It has been so helpful as it has made us see problems that we could have overlooked.

As we are expecting more kids to test on, am really glad of the progress we have made and by next week we hope to produce a working solution for camp for all.

Till next week

Chiso