Hello, Júlia here (again),

So my second week at the OEDK was pretty exciting, we finished our zoo project and received our new one, the one that we will dedicate ourselves for the next 5 weeks and a half. I was really anxious to know about my new project.

Well, for our zoo project me, Rahit, Nicolas and Xiaoyao (Team Lion) brainstormed a lot and we came out with a lot of ideas. After all the engineering design process we decided to create a KerPlunk, it was the idea that most fulfilled our design criteria:

• Enrichment time
• Easy to clean
• Durability
• Natural looking
• Material cost

Low-fidelity prototype

Afterward,  we had to get our hands dirty, and the outcome was amazing! I love creating and doing manual work, so being able to learn and using a lot of machines, some of them I didn’t know before, was very enriching. And here is our KerPlunk, pretty right?

 Top of the KerPlunk Medium-fidelity prototype

So the purpose of our enrichment device is to stimulate the tapirs to eat the browns (represented by the straws) in the mesh, that would be made of bamboo, and eventually the food will fall off from the top of the KerPlunk and hit the slide underneath (triangle made of wood) that makes the food go to all the directions. I would be very happy if the tapirs had a chance to play with our design!

Moving forward…after each group presented their design we were assigned to our major project, and my project is: Reel Film, or, as we call it, 2Reel2Film, with Mathias and Rahit. At Rice University their Film Department teaches the art of filmmaking using traditional analog film stock, 35mm and 16mm. But, using analog film stock is expensive: per unit it is expensive and it cannot be re-used. But there is an alternative: film can be made from scratch.

So our goal is to design and build the first machine used to make machine from scratch, the one that coats raw nylon sheets with photographic emulsion as a first step to creating 16mm film stock from commercially available sheets. I’ really excited for that because involves a lot of mechanics (that I love) and a little of chemistry (yey)!

See you guys next week, hopefully with much progress. Thank you, and wish me good luck!