Tag: #paralympics

This week we focused on learning Tinkercad and gaining exposure to 3D printing. Due to my experience in MakerGirl, I had worked with Tinkercad before and I was very excited to design our group name and logo! My group has Arielle as our mentor and she named her company Ingenium which is the latin word for ability or genius. We therefore decided to also name our group after a latin word. We picked Evinco which means to prevail or win!

For our logo, we had the idea to model it after a racing stripe or a lightning bolt. We ended up combining those ideas and designing a logo that was similar to a car manufacturer. Below is a picture of our logo 3D printing and the finished product!

The article we read before class this week mentioned tips and methods for conducting a good interview. One of the tips was to take a guided tour of a person’s space to best identify how to design a product for them. We found this idea really helpful and reached out to Arielle and Adam to see if they would have time to meet with us on Friday. Adam invited us to come by the DRES building Friday at 8am during the team’s practice time! This was a mixture between a guided tour, interview and peers observing peers. We were able to gain a much better understand for our project and we are now confident moving forward that we will be able to design a product to achieve our opportunity statement.

Opportunity Statement: To help athlete’s improve the grip on their ring when racing in undesirable weather conditions.

I wanted to include some of my notes and takeaways from our visit on Friday. The first thing that was helpful to learn was that the hand ring is re-gripped about every 3 months. The ring is unscrewed from the wheel and a tire tubing is placed around the ring. Contact cement is used to attach the tubing and it is heat activated for a heat gun has to be used to pull the tubing off. It is about a 4 hour process to change the grip and it has to dry for a day. Elisa asked if there was a company that changed the grips and we were all shocked to find that there was none. All the athletes have to learn to change the grip themselves and some of them will even pay their other team members to do it for them.

Another interesting consideration is each athlete pushes on the hand ring slightly differently. Therefore, we are going to try to create a product that can be modified based on the athlete who is using it. We have expanded our initial ideas to include modifications to the glove instead of just modifications to the hand ring. It was really interesting to watch the athlete’s practice and I wanted to include a slow motion video I took of one of the athletes. You can really see his stroke which is something Arielle and Adam both tried to explain to us. First the athlete, starts by pushing on the top of the handring however, during the stroke the grip changes toward the inner part of the ring.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qUhGohaYYJ7vcRGZhHt_RulwLldJPdEr/view?usp=sharing