Team Structure/Design Phase Plan
Since our very first meeting as a team in October, we created a more specific plan and team organization format and have been hard at work in the design phase. We created an online calander on google documents to share with our teammates and our mentors to share our team meeting times. Currently, we are meeting afterschool on Mondays, Wednesdays, and ocassionally Thursdays. We had a thorough discussion plan about our financial and communications plan, while arranging times for students to watch the financial and communications training videos. The students who are involved with Engineering Projects Capstone class in our EASA program also can spend time working on our project and research new ideas to present to the group.
Next, during our design phase, we started researching heavily and meeting with our engineering mentors. Currently we are in contact with a formar Adec mentor who loves engineering and designing projects and two engineers from Meggitt who offered to help with the manufacturing phase and gave advice on our ideas. Also, we took a field trip to Autodesk where we met with five engineers who offered advice for our design and our simulation process in Autodesk Inventor. With Autodesk Inventor software and Autodesk engineer's expertise help, we can create complex simulations processes for Finite Element Analysis on our structure and simulate the stress our structure under weight and heavy storms. The picture included is of our team meeting with Autodesk Engineer at a conference room at Autodesk. In the picture, we had just presented our idea and were recieving feedback on our design.
Through this extensive research and planning, we have adapted our project design and are in process to continue improving the design.
After a presentation with MIT- Lemelson representatives, we recieved the advice to develop our problem more extensively. We are already in contact with an engineer who is currently building houses in Nepal. He is Salem,Oregon- based and expressed interest in helping our team and sharing his experiences about Nepal.
Currently, we continue to develop our project and brainstorm more efficient and cheaper ways to solve our problem. With more research of Nepal, we can better define our "definition of success" with the bare nessessity of what we need to do to be successful. To better our brainstorming phase, we decided to use an Autodesk User-Experience (UX) approach tp brainstorming ideas. We plan to include color-coated sticky notes of our current ideas and research and post on a giant board on wheels. Then, we plan to place our board in our school and make it open to our school community to help brainstorm as well as be informed with our progress.
