Give an overview of your design process, sharing the product & your learning?
First, I paired up with my friend William for this project, we searched through a couple of websites and decided to make a basketball shooting toy. Then, we brainstormed ideas on how are we going to execute all the mechanisms and the toy itself. After half a class of brainstorming, we decided to have 3 parts of mechanism in the shooting, rim-movement, and the figure spinning. All of these mechanisms are meant to demonstrate the force changes (electricity, elastic, potential, mechanic, kinetic). Our final design ended up in a basketball shooting game that had a moving rim, a rotatable shooter, and a launching button. The process of building this toy is the most enjoyable part, we had to collaborate as a team in order to complete it. On the first day of the building, we made the outside case and the base of the toy and started searching for materials that could be used for the mechanisms. The second day was focused on the mechanisms, we managed to complete 2 out of the 3 mechanisms needed. Unfortunately, we missed the remainder of classes because of the ISAC basketball tournament, so we weren’t able to complete our project. Throughout this designing and building experience, I have learned about the importance of planning, if it wasn’t because we have planned how we will make our mechanisms, we wouldn’t have been as successful when building them. Other skills I learned were to work as a team, use the tools in the design space, and ways to easily and effectively cut wood.
Use the rubric & your own success criteria to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the product.
Our toy’s strengths are, it is easy to play with, has moving features, is durable/hard to break, and stable. But these strengths also lead to some weaknesses/limitations. For example, the stableness and stiffness lead to this toy being unportable or hard to carry. Also, because we have a lot of mechanisms, this toy is extremely hard to make and that might be another weakness of our toy.
Explain how and why your toy/device meets the design specifications.
We haven’t completed our design so technically we have failed all our criteria because the toy is not completed. But for the parts that we have completed and will not change even if our toy is built, we have met all the criteria we set for ourselves. We have spring in the launching“ device (first criterion), we used only 1 motor (second criterion), we used only wood outside the mechanisms (third criterion), our toy only needs 5 steps to play (fourth criterion), our toy could be competed with by having scores (fifth criteria), and lastly our toy is very hard to break, the wood is very thick and all the mechanism are protected by boxes.
Other reflections: What are you most proud of? What was most challenging?
I am most proud of the fact that we came up with all of the ideas and use of mechanisms in our toy. But with all of these ideas and thoughts comes with consequences of executing them. As I just said, the most challenging part of this design process is the building especially learning to use the tools and the amount of detail in this design.
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