What Is This Project?
As we embark on our last year of STEM and the start of Senior Engineering, we are working on our most ambitious STEM project yet: the Capstone Project. The goal of this project is to utilize engineering concepts to work with a group to develop a product that solves a real world issue. This project will help us think like engineers and to make connections with how actual engineers operate. My group (consisting of myself, Andersen Teoh, Tanner Spence, and Max Leonard) decided to develop a modular tool from the ice alloy pykrete to aid researchers in colder environments. Since resources are scare in cold environments such as Northern Siberia, Antarctica, and extraterrestrial planets and these researchers need to pack light, the ice based tools would be a cheap and space-effective option. The tool would be modular, with several interchangeable heads, lending to the space-effectiveness. To help advise us, we have former Pixar employee and 3D printing expert Chris Fehring and former Apple employee and engineering student Jeremy Li as mentors.
This page contains information and documents from the first planning phase of this project leading up to our project proposal. During this phase, we created our group, decided on our issue and solution, contacted our mentors, documented our demands and wishes, completed background research, created organizational infrastructure, surveyed our fellow students, and created a proposal for our project. The organizational applications we are using are Padlet, a brainstorming virtual bulletin board; Toggl, an time management website that acts our timeline and documents who is doing what task; and Coggl, a mind mapping tool to allow us to visualize our process.
This web-page includes our project proposal, survey results document, a link to our survey, demands and wishes document, our human centered design document, links to our organizational applications, our logo and its initial sketch, and my reflection on the project thus far.
This page contains information and documents from the first planning phase of this project leading up to our project proposal. During this phase, we created our group, decided on our issue and solution, contacted our mentors, documented our demands and wishes, completed background research, created organizational infrastructure, surveyed our fellow students, and created a proposal for our project. The organizational applications we are using are Padlet, a brainstorming virtual bulletin board; Toggl, an time management website that acts our timeline and documents who is doing what task; and Coggl, a mind mapping tool to allow us to visualize our process.
This web-page includes our project proposal, survey results document, a link to our survey, demands and wishes document, our human centered design document, links to our organizational applications, our logo and its initial sketch, and my reflection on the project thus far.
Our Project Proposal:
Our Survey Results Document:
Our Demands and Wishes List:
Our Human Centered Design Document:
Our Organization Applications:
Our Logo and Initial Sketch:
Scientific/Engineering Concepts
The following excerpt of concepts has been taken from Concepts section of the Project Icebreaker Proposal
"To start off, it is important that we have a basic understanding of thermodynamics so we are able to make pykrete in the first place. We need to understand how the water and sawdust freeze to make a strong material. Adjacent to this we must have a grasp on how and why hammers work the way they do and how they accomplish their job. We can acquire this knowledge by looking at the designs and exploded sketches of various metal sledgehammers so we know what makes them so effective.
After this we get to the prototypes stage, where we would use our knowledge on thermodynamics to make a mold for the toolhead that accounts for the expansion of the ice whilst also keeping the shape essential for the head. Once we have secured a prototype we like we can move onto testing where we will need a very basic knowledge of physics specifically force, velocity, mass, and acceleration when we test the project by destroying various objects to find the durability of the hammerhead as well as how long it lasts."
"To start off, it is important that we have a basic understanding of thermodynamics so we are able to make pykrete in the first place. We need to understand how the water and sawdust freeze to make a strong material. Adjacent to this we must have a grasp on how and why hammers work the way they do and how they accomplish their job. We can acquire this knowledge by looking at the designs and exploded sketches of various metal sledgehammers so we know what makes them so effective.
After this we get to the prototypes stage, where we would use our knowledge on thermodynamics to make a mold for the toolhead that accounts for the expansion of the ice whilst also keeping the shape essential for the head. Once we have secured a prototype we like we can move onto testing where we will need a very basic knowledge of physics specifically force, velocity, mass, and acceleration when we test the project by destroying various objects to find the durability of the hammerhead as well as how long it lasts."
Reflection:
As a whole, I would say our group's efforts have been successful thus far, but not without issues. The first aspect that has gone well is our communication. Outside maintaining our organizational applications, we have been using the application Discord to regularly communicate with each other about our thoughts and progress. This has led to a strong sense of teamwork that has made our project not only successful, but a fun collaborative effort to work on. another aspect that went well was how well we got along. There were never any major arguments that occurred between group members and whenever we disagreed on what way we should take the project, we were always able to compromise and move forward.
For everything that went well, we did have our missteps that limited the success of our project. One of these was our time management. There were points during this project where we started certain assignments too late and it resulted in the rushing and reducing of the potential quality. The Human Centered Design document is an unfortunate example of this. Moving forward, we will be sure to account for this and improve on this aspect. Another failure of our project thus far is making sure everyone is pulling their weight. Throughout the first part of our project, there were points where the work load was not being evenly shared or certain people weren't getting their parts done in time. This isn't the fault of anyone, but the failure of the group as a whole. This will be something we all need to work on moving forward.
For everything that went well, we did have our missteps that limited the success of our project. One of these was our time management. There were points during this project where we started certain assignments too late and it resulted in the rushing and reducing of the potential quality. The Human Centered Design document is an unfortunate example of this. Moving forward, we will be sure to account for this and improve on this aspect. Another failure of our project thus far is making sure everyone is pulling their weight. Throughout the first part of our project, there were points where the work load was not being evenly shared or certain people weren't getting their parts done in time. This isn't the fault of anyone, but the failure of the group as a whole. This will be something we all need to work on moving forward.