Happy Meal Toy & More
It is a kid's dream to one day get a nice happy meal toy. But it is (possibly) an engineer's dream to design his or her own toy for the old Ronald McDonald. At least it was mine.
Background: My Introduction to Design class that I took in my freshman year has been one of the classes that I have most enjoyed taking, especially due to the amazing projects we worked with. Unfortunately, I lost the pictures and videos I took from it because I took this class in 2017 (before my two gap years), so I have since then switched phones and emails. However, I can summarize what I did and share the files I have recovered.
This class had Team Design Challenges. The first one was to take apart a flashlight, and analyze its anatomy. In other words, create a bill of materials, drawings, a flowchart showing the part connections, etc. I was able to recover some photos of my team's report. Here are they:
Structural Diagram:
Exploded Assembly Drawing:
For the second challenge, we all had to design a way of carrying a balloon into a box 10 feet away, and pop it, without using our hands. We could build wood structures to carry it, use ropes, anything. Unfortunately, I lost the footage of our mechanism, but we were able to do it, by attaching a balloon to a wood cart, moving it to the box, and then use a huge wood stick to pop it. We had to do so under a specific time constraint, and we succeed!
For the third challenge, we worked with McDonalds to design our own toy. It had to be injection moldable, cheap and related to some sort of event. My team designed the following:
Collectible pieces that form a basketball hoop where kids can attach their sauce packets and dunk their food! It was a very interesting project as we had to work with industry standards, create bill of materials, forecast of sells, etc. However, being completely honest, I feel like it was a very good product haha. We were only in our freshman year, but looking back I wish I had tried other fun ideas. However, it was a great learning experience! In the end, we prepared posters, printed our device, and presented to an executive from McDonald's.
The last challenge was to build a Rube Goldberg machine. This was very exciting! Basically, this machine is a device built of multiple parts that try to take a ball from A to B by triggering sensors and moving parts of it. In this project, each subteam had a few sensors and tasks to accomplish. My specific task was to create a circuit for a Piezo sensor to create an opening when the ball passed through my section. It was in this project that I found out my love for electronics. We had to build circuits, solder, create some type of art to go around our part, etc. I really wish we had pictures and videos of it, but at least I was able to recover my subteam's final report:
Takeaway: This was a great introduction to Engineering in general. I learned a lot about the design process, working hard, documentation (even though I wish I had saved my pictures and videos somewhere else), team work, and planning. Looking back there were things I wish I had different with my designs, but I learned a lot from my mistakes over the years, and that is point of it, right? There were other projects in this class, such as SolidWorks assignments, working with Rasberry Pi, Machine Shop assignments, etc. But I unfortunately lost a lot of my documentation for it. But it was an amazing time!