Evaluation and Winning concepts

The fifth week of my biomedical internship is now complete. As learning continues, things become both extremely challenging and quite exciting. Here are some highlights from week five.

For me, Week five is by far the most controversial. The week was full of exhaustion as well as anticipation. Monday began with the creation of PowerPoint presentations for our projects' evaluations, which included design criteria, proposed concepts, screening, and scoring of the three projects we had and were scheduled to present the following day. We presented on Tuesday to Will Moyo, Chikumbutso Walani, and Moreen, who provided us with constructive feedback to help us improve the project evaluations. As the day came to a close, our teaching assistant Chikumbutso Walani introduced us to electronics.

Since Wednesday was a holiday in observance of Independence Day, we spent the day making adjustments to our project evaluation in anticipation of presenting them the following day. The following day, we started learning about microcontrollers from Brendal Dzonzi's course, which included numerous practical sessions. It was extremely exciting because it gave us some useful information for our journey toward prototyping. Presentations were scheduled for the afternoon, and while other teams used Zoom to present to Will, Chikumbutso, and Brenald, our team's presentations were postponed until the following day.

On friday, our presentations marked the end of the week. We got helpful comments first thing in the morning from Will Moyo, our teaching assistants, and three other assistants from Malawi University of Science and Technology who were also working with Rice360. As we were about to begin developing our winning concepts, the afternoon was spent planning for prototype.

Overall, week five was really involving and thrilling at the same time, and it gave us the ideas we would be working on for the following seven weeks.