DESIGN - SPAN THE GAP
Leading up to our return to 2nd year we were given the option whether to do a mini project on our own or with the freshers.
As you may know in the job world it’s important to be able to work in groups so when I received this notification I was chuffed as I knew this would be fun and engaging. Hence I decided to join in and help the freshers….practice makes perfect!
The brief (in short) was to create a structure that could span a 1.5m gap from one ledge of a table to another and for it to be load tested. The tricky part however is that we were given limited resources to build the structure which were as follows:
3x 250x800x4mm double sided foam board with additional 0.1mm paper layer (recycled)
1x 4000x2.5mm string
1x 500x50mm double sided tape
4x regular 90gsm a4 printing paper
3x 30x420mm 1mm cardboard
1x 150x80mm central foam board plate for holding the weights (compulsory)
As 2nd years we were there to help, support and encourage the 1st years to get involved and acted more as observers and recorders rather than leaders.
For me it’s in my nature to take control so in this instance I found it quite a challenge to sit back and let the 1st year’s take control. My need to have perfection can be a downfall at times!
However my group made sure the 1st years ideas and suggestions were praised and criticized and as a team we all agreed in what we were proposing to build. In the end we had two initial ideas which one progressed from the other and became our chosen design.
Nevertheless when it came to building the structure we chose to improvise upon our chosen idea. Sometimes the ideas you think you have are great but until you come to test your theories you can never be sure! Needless to say we were quite happy when we had spare material to extinguish any flaws.
However we won’t count our chickens too early as the load testing is tomorrow…Fingers crossed!
Picture: http://www.industrytap.com/automated-robots-cleaning-the-entire-sydney-harbour-bridge/11310
