Assignment: Create a chair for kindergarteners completely out of cardboard. The chair must have a creative design and be able to hold 150 pounds.
What I Learned: Through this process, I was able to learn a lot about the importance of structure. Our chair had bent in the middle as soon as the tester had sat on it. I believe that it was because of the type of cardboard we used (as it was probably old) and the support that we had. I learned that we need to focus heavily on structure and material.
What I Need to Work On: I need to work on time management skills. Throughout this project, we worked on it for two weeks at least 3 hours every day. Even though we spent so much time on it, it didn't meet the standards. I need to better work on how to structure my time to ensure its success and support.
Throughout this project, we learned so much and had a lot of work to do. Though it was stressful & very time-consuming, I had lots of fun with my partner Abby. My favorite part about this project was being able to make 2 new friends, Abby and our cardboard chair, Mark the Shark. I was able to learn a lot about how to grasp this project and learn more about something I hadn't been very familiar with. My least favorite part of this project was cutting the cardboard. The cardboard was very tough to cut and was very time-consuming. it was also very sad to see mark the shark fall so quickly after the countless work & effort we put in. If I could have done anything differently, I would change the way we structured some of the pieces. I would reposition the way we put in the seat covers so that the gaps wouldn't be too wide. While creating a model of the chair on Inventor, the model helped us in ways of testing out the different places and ways to put our structures. The inventor really allowed us to visualize the design and predict where we could better structure our design. As the chair was being tested, our chair had broken. The bottom of the chair bent and broke as the weight was applied, because of this, it caused the profiles to also tilt to the other side. My partner and I worked very well and strategized how we could work to the most potential of the chair. We had utilized an entire week working on the chair as well as working for plenty of hours. While working on the chair, we took turns cutting the cardboard and drawing out the profiles. To any future IED students doing this project, I would recommend making your design unique but not too complicated. You don't want to make the design too extreme or boring, but more planned out in the sense of strength and design qualities. I believe that our design was very complex and had too many factors which overall contributed to our design failure.
