May Blog Entry

May was our final month to work on our invention before Eureka Fest in June. We have had lots of fun during this project and look forward to going to Eureka Fest in the coming weeks. Overall this month has been vital in getting our invention to function because we had to make some major changes to what we thought was going to be our final product. We have also been getting some work done for our booth design and almost have it finalized. The changes that we have made were that we went back to a different design that was smaller and showed the area that is being scanned with a brush that brushes the same area that the camera is viewing for ease of use to see what you have already scanned.

 We also have been working on getting everything prepared for Eureka Fest, like our Invention Statement, Team Photo, and Final Report. Another thing that we did to prepare for Eureka Fest is that we presented our InvenTeam and school at a local farmers market. We did this to practice telling people about our invention and school like we will be doing at our booth at EurekaFest. 

We have also finalized our pamphlet, logo, and an informational handout about ticks. We also presented our InvenTeam at the Council of Industry (a group of local businesses that work with our school) in which two of our young scholars presented to 200 people. We also did a booth tuning with some board members, deputy superintendents and a college professor.

We have also started testing the detector. To test the device without using actual dogs was a challenge, we got a heating blanket and used 3D printed ticks to use the camera to view the different temperatures of the ticks and the dog itself. As you can see on the image above the 3D printed ticks are the small blue spots.

 Overall this month has been vital to our success and we look forward to going to EurekaFest and presenting in the coming weeks.