Today, our team broke into smaller groups. Two members researched adhesives that can bond acrylic and memory foam without causing deterioration. Another team member finished the revised Inventor drawing using the feedback we got from our visit at The Pines. We then emailed this design to a Wheelchair Movement Specialist in North Carolina to get her opinion of our armrest. The rest of the team worked on two fundraising ideas: a key chain and a license...
Thursday, November 29, 2012
We discussed fundraising ideas in class to see how we could use our engineering skills that we have learned to help fund the class. We are going to develop a wooden dragon puzzle that people can buy and assemble. The dragon will have the cut out wooden parts as well as instructions and a video on how to assemble it. The dragon puzzle will be pitched to a local company for sale. One member of our group has been working to revamp an older model...
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
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We met in class with another video tutorial complete and another scheduled to be done after school. A few website layouts were presented to and discussed with the whole class. The user-friendly aspects of each layout we agreed on are something to work toward as the programmers learn their way through the different coding languages the website is being written in. Meanwhile, the video producers of the group are consistently continuing to meet and...
After a short Thanksgiving break, the PivoRest members got back to work and visited The Pines at Glens Falls Center for Nursing & Rehabilitation. We met with a few physical and occupational therapists and the Therapy Program Manager there. They all seemed very enthusiastic about our project. They gave us their critiques on our current design and we received a lot of positive feedback. We are already...
Most recently we've been designing some new wax scrapers to sell at Sports Page. They've turned out pretty well so far but we had a few issues in the beginning with the laser cutter. Today in class we started pinning together our reverse engineering backpack template and it all fit together well which means we've started to get the hang of inventor templates. Lastly, all of our materials to start making more duffle bags have...
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Today in class we put in an order for more materials to make tote bags and drawstring bags that we could use for sewing practice and sell them for fundraising. Also in class today we made a plan to meet with a local company called Tough Travelers. Its a backpack company that makes heavy duty backpacks with canvas materials. We would like to meet with them to see if they could give us any constructive criticism and possibly point us in the right...
Today in class, we decided to review our design process. Since our task involves so much thought and preparation, it's very overwhelming to look at the whole thing all at once. So, we have decided to break up into a few smaller groups to try to focus on smaller parts of the big picture. So far, this is working very well for us, since we have already come up with a few new solid designs that we plan to go with. Once we make our first rough prototype,...
Our class met with three representatives from Bechtel to inform them of our progress so far this year. From the meeting, our group took away some very helpful ideas. They were impressed with our work and our drive to complete our project. Today, in class, we focused on creating more subject-like videos. Instead of creating random request videos, we plan to chose a topic and master every aspect of that topic, creating many tutorial videos in that...
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
As we approach Thanksgiving break, the PivoRest group has been focusing a more of our attention on fundraising. Since we are working with plastic, we have generated a list of items that we could make out of plastic and sell. This will improve our plastic working skills as well as generate money for our class. Also, PivoRest is working on visiting more nursing facilities to generate more feedback. The more feedback we have,...
Today in class we worked on perfecting our elevator speeches and our PowerPoint making skills. We have also been working on layouts/designs for our website. We will make up 3 templates to show to the class and get their opinion on them. We have also gotten books on CSS, PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript. We are working through them and doing the activities to obtain a better knowledge in those languages. We are also continuing making tutorial videos to...
Thursday, November 15, 2012
In the last couple of days, we have been working on several aspects of the product. We have been brainstorming logos for Pivorest, and trying to find the best one. Also, the group took another trip to the shop, to practice bending acrylic for our prototypes. Today specifically, we presented our progress to the class and discussed what we needed to improve and work on as a group. We also decided that in the next two weeks we were going to visit...
Today
we accomplished many things in preparation for the Kingston Roller Ski race
this Sunday. The first task accomplished was the creation of our banner that we
will take down with us to hang up at a booth. The second task that was
accomplished was that we completed our survey to ask the
many roller skiers that attend the race. As well, we have some more tote and
drawstring bags completed that we would like to sell at the Roller Ski
race. ...
Today we gave our presentation on what we have done to the class. We received many tips about what to do next and we will consider what will actually be feasible and implement as many ideas as possible. We have been working on how we are going to receive requests from our users. Currently we have a box that our users can type into and then click a button to email us exactly what the user entered into the box. This is one of many different ways...
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Today the First Wave Pack gave their progress report. Looking back on what we have accomplished, we realize we are making great progress. After the report was given, the team worked on inventor drawings because the Kingston roller ski races are this weekend. We are trying to get a rendering of the bag done so people at the race can see what our bag will look like. In the coming weeks the group will divide an conquer, half the group will start...
Our website was redone so it will be easier to change by having all the essential parts of the website in its own file. These essential parts is then shown in the website. This makes the site easier to change because if you change the file you then change the logo. For example, it is changed on every web page. We also have started to crack out the videos. We have 7 total at the moment with a large commitment of time into each one. We have...
Today in class, our team got together and discussed the possible logo designs we are going to present to our class later this week. We also worked on what we are going to say during our presentation on what we have accomplished so far. After class, three members of our group met with Brian Casey again to work on bending plastic. They made a curve to work on what width, length, and diameter will work best for most arms. In addition to this, members...
Thursday, November 8, 2012
After a successful
Skype meeting with a Colorado board of administrators, the team quickly went
back to work on the project. We have
made an appointment for tomorrow to meet with the nurses from Sunnyview
Rehabilitation Hospital in Schenectady.
We hope to gather more information there, regarding comfort and mobility
of the arm, and would like to see if they are interested in our project. Our goal for next week is to have...
Today we received our own Yeti Microphone and we were able to show Mr. Gallagher and our project manager Olivia the three videos that we have completed. The videos were approved, so we can continue making more videos like the previous three if not better. We had our biweekly assessment with Mr. Gallagher today and each group member was assigned a specific task and a deadline. A dragon, made by creating two-dimensional parts on a laser...
We already have orders for our tote bags that we are sewing for fundraising. We have made progress sewing. I got through a big chunk of the catch-all bag, while Connor and Tom got work done on their drawstring bags. My goal is to be finished with this kick off project by the end of the weekend and to start on the tote bags. Today we gave ourselves the challenge to find all the materials needed to make a tote bag for less than the Llama tote bag kit...
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
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Today in class, we did several dry runs of our script that we would be using for our Skype call with Colorado. This call was to inform a board of administrators as well as Leigh from MIT what our Engineering Design and Development class is all about. Group members gave their elevator pitches,our treasurer spoke about finances and fundraisers, and our project manager helped lead one topic into the next. Overall, the call went over...
Friday, November 2, 2012
To learn through experience how exactly to approach the development of tutorial videos, the video production team within our group worked to create three tutorials. The programming team in our group embedded the videos on the website from private links to YouTube where the videos were originally posted. The video-making process was significantly more time consuming than originally anticipated. An animated logo is also an emerging possibility...
On Thursday, we made progress on our script for Monday's Skype conversation. Today we spent a large portion of class working on our elevator pitch, making it shorter and more concise. We also tested out everyone pitching it and even recorded some videos to see how we looked. Our inventor group worked more with the flange function of the sheet metal program. This lead to some cool angular backpack designs. Tom and Connor are close to completing their...
Today we worked with Brian Casey after school, who is helping us with plastic molding. He is continuing to put in his input about our project, and has given us some great suggestions. For example, he gave us a ball-and-socket joint that we plan to reverse engineer next class, since it will most likely end up being the type of joint we will use for the PivoRest. We also received our foam today, and are beginning to accumulate the...
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