Capstone - Step one

Introduction

During step one of our capstone project we've been able to accomplish such steps as identifying the need for a product and have begun getting underway in developing our final idea. We've done lots of thinking of problems for teachers around our school and came to the realization of how disruptive the teacher's assistants can be. All of our group members have witnessed these assistants running into the class causing a disruption and taking away from school time. Since we've located this problem we created a list of ideas to eliminate such problem then created a demand and wish list for how we could resolve this problem. Eventually we were able to clarify the problem by surveying teachers, and finding their thoughts on assistants and their opinions on how to better our product to their needs. 

The Problem

Currently in our school transporting materials across campus is a time consuming objective often done either by students or teachers, in both scenarios this will take a lengthy period of time and takes away from learning. Secondly often "teachers assistants" or "office aids" when entering classrooms can be incredibly disruptive as they divert attention away from learning, often are chatty and talking to their friends, and overall get lessons off course. 

Our Solution

our solution is a remote control car with long range capabilities that will alleviate the problems of students and teachers taking their time to transport materials and prevent disruptions in class. Our car will have locked containers to store materials to be transported, will have long range capabilities so it will work no matter how far across campus you drive it. 

Does this solve teachers problems ? 

teachers report not trusting students to leave class in fear they will never return, some teachers say sending a student down to the office can take in excess of fifteen minutes before they ever return. Our remote control car will be able to reach speeds up to 35 mph which is faster than the average humans walking pace of 4 miles per hour. 

Some teachers report when kids enter a class they are relatively disruptive and make noise. Our vehicle will be fully electric and make no noise entering or exiting a classroom if it does so. Lastly all of our teachers we interviewed were interested and excited in seeing our product working and coming to a completed idea. 

Throughout our first step we've been constantly asking ourselves how can we deliver materials remotely to teachers in the safest way possible and in the most effective means for teachers. We've thought up ways of using drones, of using trebuchets, cannons, vacuum air systems around campus and eventually we settled on using a similar system to that was already in place in other campuses. Little robots. With little robots we have the ability to keep it on the ground and not use fans like on a drone which would be dangerous, it would be relatively cheap since there is a mass market of remote control cars already, and we would be able not make huge modifications to the campus which would cost a lot more money. With this we were ab le to start thinking up uses and ways our car would be beneficial around campus. we would be able to deliver necessary supplies around campus at a rate that not only is faster than uses other students but doesn't interrupt their learning time by making them transport supplies themselves. With this knowledge we still thought up a survey to ask other teachers around campus and began getting feedback on our design. 

By the end we've been able to design a product, sketch our possible components to put on our product, find the use for our product within an academic campus, gain feedback and create a demands list for items to make our car achieve its goal and a wish list for more components we would like to add in the future. 

Conclusion 

In conclusion I think we were very successful in step one of our capstone project, we've been able not only locate a problem and verify the problem, but also been able to come up with a solution and start brainstorming how we could make our product even better at it's job later down the line. 

In all I think I did really good job as a communicator and critical thinker. I've been able to communicate effectively with our mentor and other teachers while surveying them and helped lead such communications in my groups as well as really get our goals and point across effectively. I've also been able to critically think about how our project should work. My previous physics teacher told me continuously to Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) since then i've been trying to adopt this methodology into our project by keeping our goal simple the base of our project simple and that way we can have a lot less components to go wrong or worry about.  

Two things I did not do well at was being a conscientious learner and collaborator. I lacked in these categories due to not always putting in my 100% effort in class which I need to improve upon and that coincides with my lacking of collaboration as well.