After The EXPO

The Engineering Expo at Coppell High School is an annual event hosted by our engineering program.  Each year thousands of people come to CHS to see what we are doing in our program.  Our students show their projects, their work, and talk about engineering.  Additionally, we bring in 60-100 engineering colleges, companies, and societies.  The community gets a chance to see the entire engineering pipeline from high school through to industry.  It is a great chance for us to show off what we are doing and prepare ourselves for the next step in our lives.

At the Expo, our team took advantage of the opportunity to rollout the first prototype of our invention.  It was a very tight and fast approaching deadline.  There was a lot of pressure on us to get this first iteration done and ready for public display.  Everyone was quite nervous.  In the end, we pulled through and finished everything in time.  The monitor and stand worked well.  The button pressing demo did exactly what we wanted it to do.  And everyone was impressed with the XBox Kinect demo.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.  There were lots of great suggestions to issues we were starting to encounter.  Additionally, people brought up issues we hadn't even though of.  During the Expo, representatives from MIT were at the booth beside us.  We are very thankful for their advice and support.  

We have started working on the next iteration which will bring all of the components together into one single system instead of three separate parts.  We are also upgrading the stand to make it more stable and wheel-chair accessible.  The team is also starting to work on "hacking" a Windows Kinect.  Upgrading to the new Kinect will get us better data and interaction.  The hard part is that no one done that yet, so we are heading into even more new territory.  

The Engineering Booster Club has been wonderful to us.  They recently purchased the engineering program a new Surface Pro 3 to test out for use in the labs and with the teams (like FRC and Solar Car).  It was a timely purchase, because we have to use Windows 8 for the new Kinect and the school district uses a Windows 7 network.  Talk about great timing!

Stay tuned for more.  We are finishing the second iteration in a couple of weeks.  We will post an update on this blog.  We are also updating information on our school webpage at www.coppellisd.com/CHSInvenTeam and our Twitter feed @DsrptvInov8n.