Creative Engineering Project
For my creative engineering project, my group and I created a water filter to help the world get cleaner water. The people in my group were Shasta Parker, Leo Buoncristiani, and Donnie Benitez. Our water filter was simple and inexpensive. It contained layers of cotton balls, gauze and charcoal which made it very low cost. Our goal was to improve the water quality in places such as Somalia and Madagascar. Below is a picture of our water filter:
Above are images of water before and after they were run through our filter.
Content:
The engineering design cycle includes:
Problem Definition- figuring out your problem.
Brainstorming- thinking about how to solve the problem.
Research and investigation-researching how you could make your ideas work.
Generating Multiple Solutions-figuring out which few ideas are the strongest .
Choose the best solution- picking the best out of all your ideas.
Product Development - modeling and prototyping your ideas.
Testing and evaluating- testing and experimenting with your product.
Redesigning and improving- fixing and revising any problems with your product.
Reflection:
The skills I gained from this project include problem solving, video editing and learning what items can be used to filter water. Two peaks of this project were being able to feel like I am helping people in Africa in some small way and learning how to problem solve. Just reminding people and putting the idea and their mind can blossom into a full blown water filter business. I learned how to problem solve when things didn't work out with our water filter and the water still ended up dirty. We were able to solve this by rearranging the order of the materials to help improve the filtration system.
Two pits of the project were recording the voices for a video and having an inconsistency in the efficiency of the filter. It was difficult to record the voices for our video because people make mistakes and there are many noises around the classroom. The inconsistency of the was hard to manage because who would want an inconsistent filter. To help solve this we tested it many times and found the order of materials that was the most consistent.
Future steps for our filter would involve making it on a larger scale and advertising the product. We would need to make the project on a larger scale so that it would take less time to make all the filters and they would be more efficient. We would need to advertise the product because otherwise no one would know about our amazing and inexpensive product.
The engineering design cycle includes:
Problem Definition- figuring out your problem.
Brainstorming- thinking about how to solve the problem.
Research and investigation-researching how you could make your ideas work.
Generating Multiple Solutions-figuring out which few ideas are the strongest .
Choose the best solution- picking the best out of all your ideas.
Product Development - modeling and prototyping your ideas.
Testing and evaluating- testing and experimenting with your product.
Redesigning and improving- fixing and revising any problems with your product.
Reflection:
The skills I gained from this project include problem solving, video editing and learning what items can be used to filter water. Two peaks of this project were being able to feel like I am helping people in Africa in some small way and learning how to problem solve. Just reminding people and putting the idea and their mind can blossom into a full blown water filter business. I learned how to problem solve when things didn't work out with our water filter and the water still ended up dirty. We were able to solve this by rearranging the order of the materials to help improve the filtration system.
Two pits of the project were recording the voices for a video and having an inconsistency in the efficiency of the filter. It was difficult to record the voices for our video because people make mistakes and there are many noises around the classroom. The inconsistency of the was hard to manage because who would want an inconsistent filter. To help solve this we tested it many times and found the order of materials that was the most consistent.
Future steps for our filter would involve making it on a larger scale and advertising the product. We would need to make the project on a larger scale so that it would take less time to make all the filters and they would be more efficient. We would need to advertise the product because otherwise no one would know about our amazing and inexpensive product.