Here I am, posting another blog about my project in design…Oh! Sorry. Kankan here, again, and I’m here to tell you about another project I made in design! This time, Mr. Layman’s challenge really made our imagination spin wild and tested a lot of our design skills: from analyzing to planning to actually make stuff. Our project was to design a prototype that can detect smells. Now, this thing doesn’t exist yet, but if it does, I don’t know about it, but this was our challenge. The prototype didn’t have to actually work (if it did, then we would be famous!), but it still really challenge our creativity and designing skills. As you can see in the pictures above, my prototype resembles a compass with two big cardboard circles with the top that has letters on it, saying N, S, E, and W with a smaller cardboard circle sandwiched between it with black mesh holding it together and a popsicle stick punching straight through the middle. I used a combination of cardboard, hot glue and mesh to make this compass, plus a lot of lead. You might be thinking, but, Kankan, you didn’t tell us how it works yet! If you are thinking that, wait, I’m getting to it! My inspiration started when I thought about cardboard. Cardboard, if you cut it in half and look really closely at the center, it is made up of holes inside. I thought, if we could make this in real life, I could put sensors inside the holes to detect smell! With that in mind, I cut two big circles of cardboard and one smaller circle, and cut an identical hole that matches up in all of the circles, where the popsicle stick goes. And here is the part where I tell you how the compass works. If the compass worked, then the small circle between the two larger ones act as a vacuum, sucking in air to the sensors inside the holes of the cardboard. The sensors, after detecting a smell, rotates the popsicle stick so that the shadow that it creates, like a sundial, points to the direction that the smell is coming from. Now, before you say it, I will address some of the problems with my design. And before I say that, I just want to tell you that this project was a rush job. So don’t judge me! So, onto the problems. One, the compass only tells us where the smell is, but not what it is. Also, there may also be other smells in the air, so the compass may not know which smell to lead us too. But other then that, I think it’s good! This project was also enjoyable, though we didn’t have much time to do it, since we spent much of this semester on our other project, my last blog post. So thank you to Mr. Layman for being so helpful, and I hope that I have design next year, too!