During the first half of the week, we worked with our teams to research, brainstorm, evaluate, design, and prototype anteater enrichment devices for the Houston Zoo, as part of our five day Engineering Bootcamp. My team was quite proud of our final design, the Fency Feast (pictured below), which includes a laser-cut, wooden board that can be mounted to the fence via zip ties. It has a modified bottle cap glued into a center hole, thus allowing the zookeepers to screw in transparent plastic bottles filled with pelleted food from the other side of the fence. This allows easy, all-day access for the zookeepers and visitors to watch the anteater’s long, distinctive tongue in action.

And at the end of this week we finally got our teams and the projects that we will be working on for the rest of the summer.

I will be continuing my project from the spring semester of ENGI 120, to build a flotation device for Liam Smith, a local teenager whose cerebral palsy and tracheal tube present unique safety considerations. Joining me are Gigi and Rafael. So, we spent the latter half of the week familiarizing ourselves with the project, identifying what went wrong with previous prototypes, and performing more in depth research of the problem and possible solutions. We have dubbed ourselves SEED’s Smith’s Squirtle Swim Support Squad, named thusly because Liam loves the animated TV series, Pokemon, and Squirtle is a water based Pokemon (yes, we’re all nerds, how could you tell?). Gigi finds the name immensely amusing and keeps adding more alliterative words to it every time I turn my back!