Reverse Engineering 

Project Overview:

During this project, we were tasked with breaking apart a common household object or toy and reengineering the object to improve it. The toy that we chose to break apart was an inflatable man brought in by Natalie. First, my group and I made a gantt chart to outline what we will be working on during the project and some important deadlines (this can be seen below). After breaking down the inflatable man and his base, we identified all of the key elements that made the tube man work and started to research what the parts accomplished. For our project redesign, we decided to make the fan more practical so that it not only inflates the tube man, but also blows air around the room it is in. The final step for us was to create conceptual sketches to visually show our redesign in all of its glory. Our slideshow and report can be seen below. 

Reflection:

This project went swimmingly for our group, each member contributed to the success of our report and slideshow. Two things that we did well were teamwork and organization. Each member worked with the team to create the Gantt chart and then once that had been completed, everyone knew what their jobs were and we were able to work collaboratively to complete our project by the given deadline. Adding on to that, each team member stayed organized with their roles within the group and had all of the work organized in a simple-to-read and understand report. Two things that we could work on as a group are researching and collaboration with writing. We need to improve our research skills because there were some things in our project like the motor that we could not find the exact model of and that threw off our presentation a little bit because we did not know the motor's capabilities. We also could work on our collaboration in writing because, at some points during the project, it seemed like one person was doing a lot of the writing for the report. Overall this project was a good learning experience and a good intro to building and reworking existing products.