Junior Design Project

During the spring semester of my junior year at Westmont, we had a class, Junior Design, that taught us the principles and applications of the 4D Design Innovation process.

I was tasked with leading a team of myself and four other students to create STEM educational kits for kids aged 6-17 who were attending an after school program called Academia Matices in Quito, Ecuador.

After many iterations of stakeholder interaction, feedback, and ideation exercises, my team came up with the concept of a small robotic car and an adjustable ramp with surfaces of different roughness.

The education goal of our kit was to teach kids about gravity, friction, and free body diagrams. We had the students vary the angle of the ramp as well as the surface of the ramp and observe how easy or hard it was to drive the car up the ramp.

For some of the older kids, we also gave them some problem sheets to take home that explained concepts such as gravity, free body diagrams, and Newton’s second law.

This project was a great way to serve a community from a cultural context that was very different to my own. It was also a good introduction to the Design Innovation process and I took this experience and applied it to my year-long Senior Design project.