WH GCE Portfolio

For this second unit of Design and Engineering, we learned about how engineers design bikes. We went on several Field Experiences to different bike shops and had designers come in to talk to us about the design of bikes and how that whole process works. At Earth Rider and Working Bikes, we learned about how bikes are made and repaired, and also went out and rode a brand-new type of bike called e-bikes that use electricity to help you pedal. For this Action Project, Better Bikes, as part of a team we brainstormed and developed a custom bike design to best meet the needs of a specific user. The persona that my team was assigned for this project was Vanessa. She has a younger sibling that she needs to take to daycare every morning, and they need to also deal with potholes and loud cars and trains around them. She also has to work around there not being any space inside her home, so she have to lock her bike up outside instead of bringing it inside. Our new bike design is needed becaus...

This new STEAM unit is about learning to Design and Engineer products. This Action Project asked us to redesign an existing tool so that it could be used by anyone using empathy. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and relate to how they feel. It relates to this project because of how we need to be able to empathize with people to make a product that will work for everyone. The new tool that we created is a variation of a Mattock axe. The more flat part of the mattock head (the adze) is used for tilling the soil after you break it up with the pickaxe/axe part. The mattock does not have any real kind of grip to help you get leverage on it easier. It comes in varying weights; 2.5 lb  and 5 lb versions were the ones we saw when we went to go research our tools at a nearby Home Depot. The pick mattock uses a 3rd class lever. This is because of how the fulcrum is at one end of the tool, the input is in the middle, and the output is at the other end of the...