My Internship Experience - Week 1
Updated: Aug 8, 2021
The first week of the internship was mostly introductions. Particularly on the first day, we were divided into teams by Will Moyo the Design Studio Manager and assigned to two projects which involved the pulse oximeter and the dental mouth opener while being given the freedom to choose one other project to make that the third project for each team. Me and my teammates had a little chat of what is expected of us before lunch and after lunch. Wongani the design studio technician took us through the safety measures of the Design Studio as he introduced us to the equipment available in the design studio. He also told us where to find materials if we ever needed anything.
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Will Moyo took us through the Engineering deign process where she focused on clarifying team assignments and understanding problem or context. It was from there that we gave each other roles in our teams to ensure that everything is moving forward.
We had a workshop with Mr. Mafuta and Mr. Nganjo on needs finding and project scoping. The project run for the whole day and we were basically learning about how to go about the whole design process. One of the major things we learned was that if the project scope is too big, we need to scope it down to make it just right but if it is too small, we need to scope it up to make it just right.
In the same week, we went over the background, existing solutions, business perspective and what governs the problem for the two problems that we had. At this point we were still brainstorming and thinking of the third project we were going to embark on. We spoke to one of our supervisors Hope Chilunga and he helped us come up with the third project which is a suction tank monitor. On the final day of the first week, we met George Banda at the NEST warehouse so that we could ask some questions on the pulse oximeter. He gave us an engineer’s perspective on how to go about the project while answering the questions that we had concerning the pulse oximeter. From there we had an idea on how to go about the project.