Final Project: Final Product and Future Improvements

Final Product Description:
Our final mat has a two part design one being the spinner and the other being the mat itself. The spinner is used as a visual cue to the children that can accompany a verbal cue from the teacher. The spinner is large enough to be visible, but small enough to be portable so it can be removed from the children's level if necessary. Also, the spinner can be spun by a child or simply moved by the teacher as Sonja does in the demonstration video. The mat has two red and blue sides corresponding to the red and blue of the spinner. Each side is touch sensitive and will light up as the child sits down on the mat then turn off for the remainder of the lesson. In this way, the mats entice the children to sit on them while avoiding becoming a distraction during the lesson.

Highlighted Steps:

• 1st CSC visit
• We went to the CSC to observe the children and listen to the teacher talk about the needs of the classroom and aspects of working with children that we may have not thought of
• Brainstorming 
• Sonja and I drew up as many ideas and approaches that we could think of for the design. We considered light, weight and touch sensors before settling on the buttons. We also had grand ideas about creating a wireless system with the spinner that corresponded to the colors.
• 2nd CSC visit and meeting with Teacher
• We met with the teacher to go over our idea and take some measurements such as the maximum size of the mats and the average weight and size of a child of that age group.
• Mock-up
• We created a foam core model of our design in order to think about the logistics of construction and decide what materials we needed.
• Code Work
• we wrote a code for the buttons and lights that would make the light tags light up when the child sat then turn off for the remainder of the class.
• Building
• After gathering all our materials we started assembling our mat. There were a lot of logistical problems that we had to work out that were not considered when initially thinking about our design. We made sure that the final mat was clean cut, neat, easily accessible for repair and child friendly.
• Presentation and Demo! 
• Sonja and I demonstrated our product to the class and a few guest visitors. 

Final Demo Video:
Here is the demo! The lights are not very bright, but hopefully you can see them light up.

Photo of our Mat:

Photos of Us with our Mat:

Further Improvements:

• Compress the components to make the mat thinner and easily manageable for children to move around themselves. 
• Also make the mate lighter, as of right now it is a little too heavy. 
• Make the lights more flush to the mat itself to make sure that the children cannot pick at them
• Use Brighter lights
• Make the mat sealable so that it is accessible for repair, but not easily opened by the children.
• Match the Colors of the mat and the spinner.
• Make sure absolutely no wires are exposed. 

Reflection: 
Working on this project as our capstone for the course was great way to end the semester. I think it really helped to solidify and integrate all of the knowledge that we have gained over the past semester in a variety of areas. Although at times this class, and the final project, were extremely frustrating the reward for successfully addressing a problem outweighed the pain of the struggle. I am quite happy with our final project, even though I realize that it is not yet usable in a real classroom. I think that our work on this project could potentially inform the students after us and help them to create a better version than we did. The idea that next years students could work on our project emphasizes to me that engineering is all about works in progress.