Praxis II: Friend-Safe Gate and Wristband System at Friends Daycare

I worked on this project with teammates Alex Han, Helen Huang and Parrot Xue.

Project Overview

This project was part of the Praxis II course. The product of this project was a design concept for a gate and wristband system that prevent children from escaping daycare premises while reducing staff workload. This project was similar to the Praxis I project, but more complex. Rather than dealing with an opportunity centred around ourselves as Engineering Science students, this project involved the community of Friends Daycare, located in downtown Toronto. This project also required us to consider sustainability while developing our design concept.

One-Pager Summary

The document below is a one-pager that we created as a team, and that was handed out to guests at the 2026 Praxis II Showcase. It summarizes the opportunity for this project, key features of our design concept, verification data, sustainability considerations, as well as next steps for the project.

Below is also a short video of a physical prototype we constructed, which shows the opening and closing motion of a gate with a gravity latch.

This Project in Context

Through this project, I was able to enact my approach of discipline & diligence when gathering information on the Friends Daycare community to fulfill our due-diligence. First, we did thorough research on the community, gathering information from the RFP as well as from conversations with daycare a staff member. We also went beyond what was explicitly mentioned by stakeholders to ensure our recommendation was responsible. For example, we researched regulations for emergency exits and evacuations to ensure our design concept was safe in the case of an emergency.

This project also made me realize the value of simplicity in engineering design. In earlier parts of the design process, I found that my team was getting overwhelmed with our requirements framework. There were many considerations involving the needs of staff, parents, children and other users of the space, and each of these needs impacted the requirements for the gate. What ended up helping was creating simple working definitions and simplifying our requirements list to only the bare essentials. I discuss this experience in more detail on the page dedicated to the PIAA framework. In all, I realized that simplicity is very valuable in order to think clearly about a complex situation like in this project.