Week one: June 10, 2016
Lucas Gutembergue da Costa
Hi everyone,
I’m Lucas Gutembergue da Costa, one of the SEED interns and a Brazilian Mechanical Engineering student. For the next 7 weeks I will be describing in this blog my experiences with the Summer Experience in Engineering Design (SEED). So let’s get started!
Our first week at the OEDK has been focused on getting to know each other and learning about the Engineering Design Process. On our first day we introduced ourselves, did some icebreakers activities and visited the zoo for a scavenger hunt. It was a great team bonding activity and the Houston Zoo is amazing, so we could see some great animals.
On the second day we received information concerning the structure, organization, tasks and schedule of the internship, followed by safety regulations and guidelines at the OEDK. We also learned what are the resources available at the OEDK ,where they are located and how we can access them. Afterwards, in small groups, we gave presentations on multiple aspects of the culture of the countries, cities and regions where we live. It was really interesting to learn about the background of different people I will have the opportunity to work with.
On Thursday, the third day, we started the Engineering Design Boot Camp. During the Boot Camp we will learn about the steps of the Engineering Design Process and exercise them with project examples. So, we learned about the first steps of the engineering design: Clarify team assignment, interview with the client and/or user and research. Also since the best way to learn the Engineering Design Process is by doing it, we will develop a design project for the Houston Zoo. This project’s goal is to develop a enrichment device for the couple of giant anteaters currently living at the Houston Zoo. The device needs to mentally stimulate the anteaters so they can demonstrate their natural behaviors and have better welfare. If you want to learn more about giant anteaters click here (they are really cool animals) and if you want to learn more about environmental enrichment click here.
Then we put this knowledge in practice for the anteater project. We started by discussing the given problem and preparing a list of questions for the anteater keeper. After we made a visit to the anteater exhibit and interviewed the keeper. Then we returned to the OEDK and started researching.
On Friday we finished the research for the anteater enrichment project and moved on to the next steps of the Engineering Design process. Therefore we learned about how to convert the client’s needs and expectations into design criteria, how to quantify the design criteria using the information given by the client and user defined scales (UDS), how to rank the different design criteria and the methods to brainstorm to generate a wide range of ideas and possible solutions. Again we applied all those steps to our anteater enrichment project. Also today during lunch we meet Dr. Maria Oden, Dr. Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Dr. Veronica Leautaud, all of them are directors of the Rice 360 Institute for Global Health and they will monitor our work.
After this first week I see a lot of opportunities to learn and grow professionally and personally. I hope that by working with a very diverse group of people we can all grow together and develop great solutions for the problems we will be tasked during this summer, starting with the anteater environmental enrichment. In summary, I am very excited about this internship.
Thanks for your attention! Until the next post!