Our engineering summer has officially started. This week was spent mainly at our classroom for the summer at ULACIT. To be honest, I was not sure what to expect for this makerspace at first. However, after having worked on the prototypes of our ENGI 200 projects for the past week, I’ve found that the space is incredibility functional and has allowed for our project to move forward at a pretty quick pace.
Speaking of prototyping, our project is a device that seeks to recreate the tremors that patients with Parkinson’s experience during mealtime. This project is a continuation of the work and research we did during the BioD bootcamp last week. Due to our previous work on the project, we were able to jump right back in and get started on making a working porotype pretty quickly. Although our week started with a little bit discussion of different methods to cause the tremors such as using electrodes or tiny motors on each finger, we decided to stick to our original idea of using a single motor with an offset weight. However, we moved the location of the motor to the top of the hand to allow for the palm area to be clear and be able to perform action such as grip a cup.
With our combined efforts, our team was able to get a working prototype and I am quite excited to see where the project will go! Working with the team has been a lot of fun and I think we’ve created some good memories as well as developed personal skills and empathy for patients with Parkinson’s.
While most of our week was spend at ULACIT, we did also get a few opportunities to check the city out. The most notable outing was the field observations that we will conduct every Friday. This week we went to the Jade Museum which was great. While the actual Jade section was pretty small, it was still jam packed with many cool artifacts. Our groups also really enjoyed the interactive activities at the museum. Namely, we took on the roles of “anti-archeologists” by burying the bones in the sand pit for future visitors to find. We that when the next kid comes by and discovers a big pile of bones, they will consider a career in actual archelogy!
This week was not super eventful as it is not the weekend yet but I still enjoyed my time at ULACIT. That being said, it will soon be the weekend and we are going to Monte Verde. It will be a weekend filled with Ziplining and hopefully less sunburns :’)
-Jeff
