Mooncake Mold Project

Project Description: The mooncake is a project that we worked in collaboration with the mandarin 5 students helping them design their mooncake molds for the autumn moon festival. The project requirements are to effectively communicate and collaborate with the Mandarin 5 class and document all of our communication.The goal of the moon cake project is to successfully create a mold that works with the hand press tool.

Project Brainstorming: The project ideas given to us was to make a mooncake mold like. traditional Chinese coin design with letters and a peony on the side. The  message we were trying to convey was 招财进宝 which means bringing in wealth and fortune. We got a few sketches and drawings of what Koh wanted so we tried to recreate the designs shown. 

Project Procdedure: For our first rough draft of the mooncake design, we made the indivisual Chinese characters first before making the coin shape so we could have a clear and organized plan of what we were going to do next. Then we made the coin mold for the letters then added the hole and the letters on to the coin. (I was on an ipad and was unable to insert the real 3d designs we made.) We then realized that we needed to invert the characters to make it look right on the mooncake. After showing Koh our revised mooncake design, he commented that our mooncake design was good but it had a flaw where the center hole was supposed. Taking his advice we quickly worked to fix the center of our mooncake by making a pillar in the middle rather than a gap.. After fixing this flaw we got started on the hooks on the mooncake mold that could attach to the top of the mooncake press which after many designs and fails we got it to work. The final step of the project was for us to print our mooncake hooks and moonckae mold together making our final product. 

Soul Reflections:  

• The strength of our work was apparent when it came to the designs of the letters and the accuracy of our design to the images that Koh showed us. 

• Some opportunities where we could have improved our project was when we could not add the peony to the design because the letters were too big. If we had more time we could have decreased the letter size to include the peony on our coin.  

• Our biggest limitation was time as we could have increased the details to the coin and maybe could have added more depth to the coin.

• The 2 letters that were most clear in our project was insightful critical thinker and clear communicator because we were critical thinkers when it came to the overall design of the coin mold and the letters on it and we were clear communicators when we could or could not do something as to not waste time.