I designed three different toys each based on a simple physical principle that a child could understand. I designed a wind up car, a wind up boat as well as a pneumatic airplane. I concentrated on the pneumatic airplane and presented that toy to the class. I learned that designing toys for children was more complicated then first seemed. The web pages that I made for the project are here:

Car

Plane

Boat

Project 2:

In this project I worked on a team to manufacture a part using rapid prototyping. We had the handle on the assembly. We had decided that SLA would be the best choice to manufacture our part. However a lack of availability forced us to manufacture our part using FDM. This project taught me a great deal about rapid protoyipng. The first part I learned is that it is not all that rapid. Granted it is much faster then traditional manufacturing processes but it still took a great deal of time to achieve our goal. What took the most time was getting all of the separate computer files to match and be in the correct format for the computer. Once that was a achieved it was just a matter of letting the machine manufacture our part. This took only 2 hours and we did not need to be around to do it. Also the post processing of the part took soem time so that it was ready to fit with the other parts. I also learned that as long as everyone knew of the limitations of our processes we could make the parts fit together without too much work. Since everyone built in tolerances to the parts it was not that hard to fit everything together. This is the completed assembly, our part is the handle in front:

Project 3:

For this project we were to design an exhibit that is designed to teach children a physical principle. The original idea was to tie this project into the life of Gretta Garbo. Based on this we decided to make our exhibit on stunt cars, and the physics behind them. The initial prototype as fairly easy to assemble. We could use mostly off the shelf parts and adapt them to our use. It just required using parts in ways that they weren't necessarily designed. This is a picture of our first prototype being used by children:

However we needed to further the project and make it more entertaining. We therefore added more activities to do. For instance we made parts to use as targets for the kids to try and hit. Also we needed to design a better ramp then we had. This is what we decicded to rapid prototype. Our design is relativly simple. We have two long screws attachted at the base that have a wing nut on each of them with a washer on top of it. On this rests a wood plank that the track is attachted to. This allows the track to be easily adjusted for angle up and down as well as side to side. From our testing with the children i learned thatthe children really enjoy playing with our project but we were not necisarily sure they were learning anything. However on our second test after we had left the children to play with the cars by themselves they started to talk about how raising and lowering the track affected the distance of the jump. Here si a picture of this:

A web page that we created for our project can also be found here.