Just recently, our school had an Innovation Day. Innovation Day is a day to celebrate science here at the OJCS. For innovation, you’re allowed to work with a partner, so I decided to work with my friend Noa Tili. This year, Mr. Ray chose to have the seventh grade’s topic be about creating a structure in VR for an animal and then pitching it as your product. Noa Tili and I decided that we wanted to choose an endangered animal to do our project on because it could be more meaningful and possibly have an important impact in the future. As a result of this, we chose to do our project about koalas.
Before I started the Innovation Day project, I felt excited and also kind of nervous. This was because, although I was excited to start doing things, I was nervous I would not have enough time to get everything done.
Additionally, what surprised me were the things I learned over time. Did you know koalas aren’t bears; they are marsupials? Also, I learned that the word koala means ‘no drink’. These are just some of the cool things I got to learn over time while creating this project.
Furthermore, the work that Noa Tili and I did in class and out of class greatly contributed to our project’s overall success. I feel that we did our best work outside of class because we had more time then. If I had to change anything to allow us to become even more prepared, I would have wanted to work a little bit more efficiently in class.
A barrier that we overcame was figuring out what our structure would look and feel like to be able to allow the koalas to thrive. Koala structure had never been done before until this, so that is something that we had trouble with. Another one of the largest challenges that Noa Tili and I faced during this entire process was fireproofing the structure. The entire reason koalas were losing their homes was because of the extremely large bushfires in Australia. Though the south is less prone to bushfires than the east, we wanted to take every precaution and protect the koalas. Naturally, Australia is prone to fires, so to prevent our structure from catching fire, we’ve set up a sprinkler system. In Australia, some people set up sprinkler systems to go on in the summer every once in a while to keep their buildings from going on fire. We got the idea for the sprinklers when Noa Tili and her mom brought up how some of her family lives in Australia. We found out that they hose down their barn every little while, so it doesn’t catch fire.
After presenting our project to the parents, we felt a little bit nervous because they were asking a lot of questions that we didn’t have answers to. Because of this, that night, Noa Tili and I got on a call and wrote down questions that we couldn’t answer, then answered them. That was something that I believe helped us tremendously the next day when presenting to the judges.
Throughout our project, Noa Tili and I did numerous things to allow our project to excel. The first thing we did to succeed was do lots of extensive research on the problem our project aimed to address and the scientific and mathematical elements. This provided a solid foundation and helped us understand the potential areas for innovation.
Some of the scientific elements we incorporated into our project include lamination, ties, struts, trusses, stability, and symmetry. Symmetry, a technique that divides into two halves by a line, is crucial in balancing loads and internal forces like tension and compression. Symmetry allows for cheaper manufacturing of components and mass production through repeating frames.
Triangles (trusses) are the strongest shapes in the world. That’s one of the main reasons that we incorporated them into the wall frame of our structure. When a structure needs a small amount of strengthening, you add ties & struts. Another reason ties and struts are added to a structure is to resist tension forces and compression forces.
Armed with insights from our research, Noa Tili and I brainstormed creative and innovative ideas to tackle the challenge at hand. Because nothing like this has ever been done, we were forced to push the boundaries of conventional thinking and explore unconventional approaches to problem-solving.
Next, Noa Tili and I continuously tried different approaches to prototyping, improving our project based on feedback and testing. This allowed us to identify and/or handle any flaws in the project, ensuring a proper final product.
Lastly, we focused on effectively communicating the potential impact of our project to judges and peers.
Throughout this entire project, I have learned many things that will help me in future projects. One of which is how to send things from Canva to others outside of the OJCS. When I needed to send things to my dad to print in a certain format that wasn’t at the school, I had trouble sending them to him until I figured out how to make a PDF print and have a fit size. When Noa Tili and I were attempting to print our Canva presentation, we ran into a problem. When you printed the presentation, it would cut off half of the paper, and through lots of testing, guessing, and researching, we managed to figure it out.
Looking at other projects, the only thing I would do differently next time is create a more bold and clean title for our board. Overall, I’m really happy with the way everything turned out, and this was such a great experience that I got to go through with my best friend and my classmates.