The three problems we considered solving were:
1. bathroom locks
2. Keeping track of time
3. keeping track of toys (our final project)
1.
Initially, we were pretty interested in resolving the problem of the bathroom locks.
They weren't very well designed, such that they were rather difficult to open once locked, due to excessive friction.
We wanted to build a different lock that rather than sliding into a hole, would revolve into a holder.
Our solution would have been entirely mechanical, and wouldn't have fulfilled the feedback and control aspect of the final project. Additionally the mechanical solution is something that should already be on the market, and wouldn't present us with a unique enough challenge for the final project.
2.
The next idea was to help students tackle the problem of keeping track of time. Preschoolers have a difficult time understanding the concept of time as presented by numbers (which they may not understand) or as presented by a analog clock face (which requires knowing the hand, minute and second in different ways and adding them together to get a time).
Thus I initially thought of generating a linear clock such that would move a marker horizontally across the wall based on how much time as passed. I thought of powering it with a weight, and and gears that slowly dragged the marker across the wall. On the wall there would be a ledge and on the ledge there would be colored blocks that could be removed and or reordered that would represent the different activities in the day. Thinking about it now, I could even put in bells for the marker to push and ring to signal the change of activities.
Like the bathroom locks problem, my solution was entirely mechanical and although it was adjustable, I couldn't really think of how to incorporate feedback and control and electronics into the system.
Additionally there is another team who is tackling this exact same problem and it was better that we worked on a project that was unique from them.
3.
the problem is that the adults need to keep track of which toys are available in a tall cabinet and which toys are out in use and unavailable.
The system that they have now, that they list which toys should be in the cabinet, on the inside of the cabinet door. the list is covered by a protective plastic sleeve, so it is possible for them to mark the list up with dry erase markers to indicate whether a toy is gone from the cabinet or not. However, that system involves finding the dry erase markers, uncapping, and recapping them, and is rather slow. Because the adults want to (and should) get back back to the preschoolers as soon as possible, the system of marking availability with dry erase checkmarks is not used, and the adults still waste time looking for toys where the toys are not.
I initially was going to work with Meba on this problem, but we found that Nanaki was also interested in this problem so we resolved to put each other down as desired team mates and the child studies center as the desired project. It turned out however, that we were split up, with Nanaki and I forming one group and Meba working with another to form another.
One of the first ideas that we considered, was to have an array of buttons that the adults could click that would set the color of led lights that would indicate whether a toy was in the cabinet or not.
each individual toy would have a label and next to the label, it would have a corresponding button and LED. When the button was pressed, the LED would toggle between green and red to indicate availability. The states of all of the LEDs would be remembered by a arduino or similar microcontroller.
Additionally, I thought that we could also double the usage of the LEDs to attract the attention the adults when they open the door of the cabinet. After all, the child study center did have a system to keep track, but the problem, along with the process taking too long, was that people didn't participate. We could sense the opening of the door through either a light sensor, or a button, or as Nanaki suggested through ultrasound. Only when we sense the door opening, we could flash the led lights with different patterns to draw the adults attention to the array with the tracking system that they need to remember to fill out. The pattern would be different each time and that would hopefully keep the the adults from being desensitized to the alert. As an added bonus, when we sensed that the cabinet door was closed, then we could know to turn off the LEDs in order to save energy.
Upon discussing with our instructor, however, we found that just the soldering of the wires of all the buttons and LEDs for the hundred toys or so would be such a large task as to be impractically time-consuming for the time given to complete the project.
Thus we went back to the drawing board figuratively and I thought about it hard. I thought about toggles that set a binary state. I came up with the idea that we could just have sliders that slid back and forth to indicate whether a toy was available or not.
The sliders would have dowel handles attached to them so that you could slide them easily left to right in the space between the window frame and the backing board to indicate the state of the toy.
The dowels would rest on little divots. These divots will hopefully discourage the slider from accidentally sliding and changing states should the array or the dowels be jolted or nudged.
On the backing board would have the colors green and red to indicate whether the toy is available or not.
Each of the sliders would have a label, that would just be a sticky note or something that the adults can replace should a toy be permanently removed or added to the repository.
I was thinking of making the entire array from Delrin and heat staking to join all of the pieces together.
This system should not be used by young children. I think children would just find it amusing, and you wouldn't be able to keep the sliders in meaningful states. Additionally, it has been mentioned that young children would have a hard time mapping the colors to the concept of availability of an item.
Initially, I thought I would have just one large one array, however, after measuring the dimensions of the cabinet for which we are installing, because there is so little clearance between the cabinet door and the ledges in the cabinet, one large array with a thickness more than a few millimeter (which ours will definitely be larger than a few millimeters thick) would be consistently smashed by the ledges and would cause the cabinet doors not to close. Therefore I changed installing several smaller panels each with their arrays.
I measured the dimensions that were available to me. For each panel installation, I figured I could comfortably have two columns of sliders and 6 rows. If I were attempting to be particularly space efficient I could probably still fit in 8 rows to a panel installation.
I am excited to actually start building.
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