From last Thursday till today its been an a great week. One thing that i can personally take home from the ending week’s experience is that engineering is more of action than it is of theory. For the days I have been here the word “Engineering” is not a noun, I have learnt that “Engineering” is a verb, it is an action word. It is beyond text and formulas that we memorize in school. It is here at the  OEDK I am learning how to translate all text and digits i have learnt in school into something tangible that can be of benefit to the world. I had an awesome time during the tool workshop, i appreciated every hand tool for use in the OEDK and honestly speaking I wish I had learnt how to work with tools from way back 🙂

 

From understanding the engineering design process my Zoo team and I were able to come up with a bawling ball as a prototype in order to help extend the feeding time of on e of the hogs “Luna” which has recently become obese. The bawling ball has an inner ball inside it to increase the time it takes for the food to come out when Luna is playing with it. Currently Luna takes about 10 minutes to finish her food. According to the tests conducted, the ball should be able to increase Luna’s feeding time to at least 30 minutes. Several other groups also came up with their devices to tackle the problem which were all sent to the Zoo keeper and we are now waiting for feedback.

This week has been amazing because our summer projects just got revealed and am glad to have a project that is in line with my summer goals. It is one of the most involving projects out of the four pitched projects. The too much work required gets me very excited, probably because I know I will learn so much during the process and will be very proud of myself when we have finished it. Electronics aside, it requires a bit of coding and solidworks,  and I love working with those two. I am looking forward to gaining all the skills required so I can be able to implement the same when back in Malawi. The project is about developing a a device that will heal wounds real quick before they turn into something else very serious like ulcers. Below is the image of the overall project. The plan is to study and implement what what others already worked on and then improve it. I so much look forward to that. For now there has been intensive research on it and it is going on very well.