Description:
This has been one of my favorite projects so far. I had the opportunity to work with some of my greatest friends. In this project we had to identify something we would like to change about the world and find a solution to it. My group chose to search for an easier way for people in wheelchairs to move around. We still wanted to work with wheelchairs, just find a way to improve them without raising the expense. We were able to get a wheelchair through one of the group members, so that made our project easy to complete with an actual visual on how our project would work.
To improve our wheelchair we decided to find a way to make "wheeling around" easier on the user. We found that individuals who live their life in a wheelchairs have many difficulties thrust upon them. For example, a lot of cities are not yet developed to support the needs of wheelchairs. Also, after a long period of being in a wheelchair, it can cause great stress on that person's muscular strength. We wanted to find a solution to this. We were able to find another way to push a wheelchair without so much stress on the body. We were able to do this by attaching a separate wheeling mechanism. We used bike gears to create a separate part of the wheelchair the user could use instead of having to push the wheels. With our new addition the user would simply have to spin the bike gears (attached to a different handle) instead of having to push themselves along. This way it was easier for people to wheel themselves along all day without using so much strength. Please follow this link if you would like to see out presentation on our project: Presentation. You can also scroll down to the bottom of this page to find a funny YouTube we made in our free-time concerning our project.
Concepts:
We didn't have any concepts in this project. This project was really all about identifying the problem then researching it, then going on to build a model of our idea.
Reflection:
Overall this project went along very smoothly. We were already all friends so we didn't run into any disagreements. This was probably my favorite group I've had the chance to work with so far. During our time in class where we had the chance to work on our projects, we weren't able to finish in time. Something good that came from this though was that we all found a time we could get together to work on it. This after-school work time turned out to be quite an amusing experience. Not only were we able to finish our project in time for the presentation but we were all able to hang out and have a good time. This was one of the good things about this project. One thing I learned was how to use bike gears. I previously had no knowledge on them, or how they function, but after this project I would say I learned a lot.
There wasn't much wrong with this project. We ran into very minimal errors. One bad thing was that we had to change our idea after realizing the wheelchair we had already possessed the function of breaks. Another bad thing was that we didn't finish our project during class, leading us to find a time to work on it after school. One last bad thing was that since we had a literal wheelchair it became very distracting and caused us to often go off task. Over the course of the remaining portion of the year I would like to improve working on task more often.
YouTube Video:
This has been one of my favorite projects so far. I had the opportunity to work with some of my greatest friends. In this project we had to identify something we would like to change about the world and find a solution to it. My group chose to search for an easier way for people in wheelchairs to move around. We still wanted to work with wheelchairs, just find a way to improve them without raising the expense. We were able to get a wheelchair through one of the group members, so that made our project easy to complete with an actual visual on how our project would work.
To improve our wheelchair we decided to find a way to make "wheeling around" easier on the user. We found that individuals who live their life in a wheelchairs have many difficulties thrust upon them. For example, a lot of cities are not yet developed to support the needs of wheelchairs. Also, after a long period of being in a wheelchair, it can cause great stress on that person's muscular strength. We wanted to find a solution to this. We were able to find another way to push a wheelchair without so much stress on the body. We were able to do this by attaching a separate wheeling mechanism. We used bike gears to create a separate part of the wheelchair the user could use instead of having to push the wheels. With our new addition the user would simply have to spin the bike gears (attached to a different handle) instead of having to push themselves along. This way it was easier for people to wheel themselves along all day without using so much strength. Please follow this link if you would like to see out presentation on our project: Presentation. You can also scroll down to the bottom of this page to find a funny YouTube we made in our free-time concerning our project.
Concepts:
We didn't have any concepts in this project. This project was really all about identifying the problem then researching it, then going on to build a model of our idea.
Reflection:
Overall this project went along very smoothly. We were already all friends so we didn't run into any disagreements. This was probably my favorite group I've had the chance to work with so far. During our time in class where we had the chance to work on our projects, we weren't able to finish in time. Something good that came from this though was that we all found a time we could get together to work on it. This after-school work time turned out to be quite an amusing experience. Not only were we able to finish our project in time for the presentation but we were all able to hang out and have a good time. This was one of the good things about this project. One thing I learned was how to use bike gears. I previously had no knowledge on them, or how they function, but after this project I would say I learned a lot.
There wasn't much wrong with this project. We ran into very minimal errors. One bad thing was that we had to change our idea after realizing the wheelchair we had already possessed the function of breaks. Another bad thing was that we didn't finish our project during class, leading us to find a time to work on it after school. One last bad thing was that since we had a literal wheelchair it became very distracting and caused us to often go off task. Over the course of the remaining portion of the year I would like to improve working on task more often.
YouTube Video: