The Up-cycle Project:
The Fall Semester of the Berggren/Holder team was built around The Upcycle, a semester-long collaboration between Engineering and Humanities classes. The broad goals of this project include recognizing and confronting our environmentally adverse consumption & production cultures that are entrenched in practices of planned obsolescence, materialism and disposability. During the course of this project, our team worked to develop an understanding of the waste that our personal & consumer habits produce, explore principles & approaches of engineering that lead to more purposeful and sustainable building, and consider the benefits inherent in designing and building with upcycled, or repurposed, materials that would otherwise persist solely as waste. |
The Publications:
The next step in the project was identifying and contacting a non-profit organization that our group wanted to work with. After many phone calls we locked in the San Diego Air & Space Museum. While we had a meeting with the head of education, we discovered a potential thing we could improve, the rudimentary glider launchers. To document the process of solving this problem and ultimately making new glider launchers, our group made a series of publications.
The next step in the project was identifying and contacting a non-profit organization that our group wanted to work with. After many phone calls we locked in the San Diego Air & Space Museum. While we had a meeting with the head of education, we discovered a potential thing we could improve, the rudimentary glider launchers. To document the process of solving this problem and ultimately making new glider launchers, our group made a series of publications.
Elevator Speeches: Just before starting the build process we were required to present quick speeches pitching our product to the class. These speeches advertised the good qualities of our project while reassuring that we were confident we could overcome the challenges we were bound to come across. Personal Reflection: This was one of the most useful and well thought out projects I have ever done at High Tech High. I appreciate that our final product will be useful to someone instead of just being trashed as it normally would. That being said, I also like the broad set of skills I learned during this project. We had to exercise extensive communication skills in a real world setting, learn to problem solve as an engineer, and learn to make clean and professional looking publications. Within each of these things we learned some specific skills. Among these were extensive planning skills, learning and using CAD, writing and editing work, and finally, learning to use different tools to fabricate our product. Along the road we did not experience many challenges thanks to our well thought out design. This said, one of the most difficult things to fabricate was the launching mechanism. When our initial idea failed to work we had to come up with a new idea. Basically all we had to do was replace the sheet metal in the launching mechanism with poly-carbonate. Proud Moments: The aspects of the final launcher I'm most proud of are the launch mechanisms and launch angle dial. The reason I'm so proud of these is because, despite the challenges, me and my team were able to create a device that could accurately replicate flights over and over again. In fact, our launcher was so precise that we could have someone stand in a specific place, launch a glider, have it do a loop and come back and hit them nine out of ten times. I am very glad we are able to donate such a quality product to The San Diego Air And Space Museum to help their students. |