Give an overview of your design process, sharing the product & your learning.

We were happy with the outside appearance of our prototype. This is called an ornithopter which is meant to show the energy conversion between elastic potential energy and kinetic energy. The wing gets the signal to flap when the user rotates the propeller to the connected rubber band, and when the user releases it, the energy transfers into kinetic energy resulting in a movement of the prototype. One scientific thing I learned about this prototype is that it was pretty cool how just using a small rubber band would help the whole toy to function and fly for so long, which made me wonder if almost all of my house toys needed energy conversion to function well. Furthermore, I also learned that being careful in all the small details is really important while doing these engineering projects. Where every measurement, material, size, tool, etc could affect any small parts of the product, which then would affect the big results and may lead to not reaching the expectations you want.

Use the rubric & your own success criteria to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the product.

Looking at the rubric to assess myself, I think overall we did a pretty good job. Our prototype does satisfy the success criteria but only two out of three. As written in the previous blog posts, our success criteria were…

-The ornithopter should be able to fly for at least 7 seconds 

-The ornithopter should be able to flap its wings successfully 

-The quality of the ornithopter should be able to hold up to 10 trials without breaking down

Our prototype was able to flap its wings successfully and was strong enough to hold up to 10 trials without breaking down. But one weakness of our product is that even though it was able to flap successfully, only one wing was able to do that, thus our prototype wasn’t able to actually fly into the air at all which. 

Explain how and why your toy/device meets the design specifications.

Our toy definitely meets the design specification because it shows clear energy conversion of elastic potential energy and kinetic energy. From the expectations we gave, the toy does have a pretty cool and creative appearance which we wanted it to have to draw the attention of the kids and many other users. Furthermore, our toy is also environmentally friendly as we decided to not use any plastic and instead used wood, sticks, and paper, which are materials that could be renewed and are biodegradable to the environment.

Other reflections: What are you most proud of? What was most challenging?

One thing I’m really grateful for and proud of is my partner and I’s teamwork and communication through building this hard and high technique/skilled toy. There were times when we wanted to give up on this project and start a new and easier one, but the patience and positive mindsets my partner and I had grabbed us from the “I give up” mindset and actually worked out pretty well. Even though the prototype couldn’t function well, I’m still really proud of the effort and strive my partner and I had put in to finish building this toy. The most challenging part of this unit was definitely building the toy. There were a lot of small parts of the building process that needed highly skilled techniques to make the mechanism work, so we need to do everything step by step and not mess up on any of the steps. One specific challenge I remember was drilling a small hole into the small wooden sticks, where these were to connect the wires to the propeller and so we had to make sure the hole wasn’t too small or too big. Due to the thin and tiny wooden stick, we needed to be extra careful when drilling, and when the hole was too big or small, we had to do the steps over and over again which was really challenging.