Overview
This is the beginning steps of our STEM Senior Engineering Capstone Project. This step encapsulated laying the groundwork for what our project was going to be. This required us to do a lot of brainstorming, planning, and research to figure out what we wanted to do for this project.
Major Steps:
- Identifying Interests
- Forming a Team
- Searching for and Contacting Mentors
- Initial Brainstorm
- Team Management Plan
- Defining the Problem/Initial Design Specifications
- Human Centered Design Research (Refined Design Specifications)
- Customer Survey
- Project Proposal
Major Steps:
- Identifying Interests
- Forming a Team
- Searching for and Contacting Mentors
- Initial Brainstorm
- Team Management Plan
- Defining the Problem/Initial Design Specifications
- Human Centered Design Research (Refined Design Specifications)
- Customer Survey
- Project Proposal
Break It Apart Challenge
This our Break it Apart Challenge. For this project, we were assigned to pick an object of our choosing, and dissect it and analyze its different parts. We also had to draw two different sketches of the object; an exploded view to show all the parts, and a conceptual sketch to show how different parts interact with each other. This mini-project was an introduction to this class and was a great way to spark thinking like an engineer. It was also a great way to test out how our team would work together.
Team Management PlanOur group was assigned to create a Gantt Chart to help keep track of assignments and deadlines. This allows our group to stay on task and stay organized throughout this project.
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Initial BrainstormOur initial brainstorming was documented on a Padlet. This shows all of our different starting ideas. New Padlets were created to help build on those ideas and help us document some of our research.
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Defining the ProblemIn order to begin brainstorming different concepts for our product, we first have to identify a problem. Identifying the problem will help up figure out what we need to produce in order to solve those problems. We documented our research and thinking through our Demand and Wishlist Document, which overviews different current issues our world faces today, and how our product works to solve said issues.
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Human Centered Design ResearchAnother part that is essential to our project is our market. Our Human Centered Design Research takes into account what people care about, what is important to people, and what people need.
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Customer Survey
This is our customer survey. This survey was designed to help give us insight to what certain things our customers need from our product. Our survey asks certain questions about how interested they are in our product, what they would need to feel comfortable with our product, and certain design features.
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Project Proposal
This is our project proposal. This is an overview of all the research and brainstorming that we did during this step of our project. After laying the groundwork for our project in step 1, we will be working on step 2 going forward. The next step will have us build on from step 1 and start creating and modifying designs to make them suitable based from the information gathered from step 1.
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Final Thoughts
This first step was simply about figuring out what we wanted to do for this project and how we wanted to go about it. A lot of this step too was about getting customer and mentor feedback, which is great when we start designing our habitat. As previously stated, our next steps are to start the designing aspect of our habitat. In order to accomplish this, we need to do some research and use the data collected from our survey to optimize our design.