Getting Ready For Our Mid-Grant Technical Review
We started the month of January off with a bang as we had to really kick it into gear in order to be ready for our Mid-Grant Technical Review on February 5th at 6:00pm at the Lower Brule High School. We will be livestreaming the event on YouTube for anyone to watch. Link available at our website www.earthbeats.us Everyone really put a lot of effort this month to make sure the prototype will be ready to be shown off at our Mid-Grant Technical Review.
The prototype for our invention, which we are naming the makȟa ȟotȟaŋiŋ, was up and functioning in November, but we decided to add additional features into our design, including fingerprint print lockboxes that can be used to secure cell phones while they are plugged into our charging stations. We are also working to incorporate a display screen that we believe will make the invention more consumer friendly. The display screen will display options such as Bluetooth, AUX, Saved Music, Use a Lockbox, and Unlock Your Lockbox. It will be touchscreen and will give the users easy access to all of the accessories that our design offers. In order to add this feature we had to come up with the design for all of the different screens and do lots of coding in order to get the screen to be fully functioning by the Mid-Grant Technical Review. A small group of students on our InvenTeam also worked on coding a fingerprint scanner that will be used to lock and unlock the lockboxes we are designing for the phones. We also used our school’s 3D printer to print various pieces that will help secure different parts of our invention to one another.
We have also published a website for our team which is now fully functional www.earthbeats.us. The group that worked on the website had to start from scratch and came up with the various pages and information for the website, along with the overall website design. We all had to vote on a name for our website and invention, and as a group we decided on the name EARTH BEATS for our website and makȟa ȟotȟaŋiŋ (Lakota for earth sound) for our invention.
