Persevere. Nothing worthwhile is easy (Barack Obama)
The Design Context Review presentations, which were held at the beginning of the week, saw each group use a powerpoint presentation of each project to deliver their Design Context Review. After the presentations, Maureen Vale(a RICE360 biomedical engineer) and our teaching assistants provided us feedback on all three of our presentations for each of the three projects. The Teaching Assistants gave us Ann Saterbak's videos on the user-defined scale in the afternoon. The user-defined scale has three steps: choosing levels, identifying levels, and establishing design criteria. Later, in the evening, we sent in the Design Criteria Review, Reference Worksheet, and Project Prompts for our projects (Training Kit, Neonatal Monitor, and Vein Finder).
On the next weekday, our teaching assistants provided us with videos demonstrating how to create User Defined Scales of immeasurable objectives and Pairwise Comparison Charts to order the project objectives. We completed the User Defined Scales Exercises and Pairwise Comparison Charts after watching the videos.
On the third day of the week, the teaching assistants introduced the fourth stage of the engineering design process—brainstorming—and showed us videos on decomposition and brainstorming. We then had a discussion with the teaching assistants about the various components of decomposition and brainstorming.
On Thursday, Chikumbutso Walani, a teaching assistant, gave a presentation on how to create a morph chart and a decision screening matrix. After that, we spoke with Ms. Will Moyo, the country manager for the Design Studio, who inquired about our progress on the projects as a group and gave us information on all the projects we are working on. The decision scoring matrix videos were presented to us in the afternoon, and we were then given the task of creating a sample decision scoring matrix for any project. Our group chose to create the decision scoring matrix for the Neonatal Monitor Project, and we then gave a presentation on it.
The Dzuka Africa Team led a workshop for us on Friday, and Dineo Mkwezalamba, the manager of Dzuka Africa, and Cuthbet Magawa gave presentations. Therefore, we concentrated on the issues of mindset change and problem validation while they spoke on the Start Me Up program.
The week was filled with difficult tasks, such as brainstorming, and I felt like giving up because of them, but then I was inspired by a quotation from Barack Obama that states, "Persevere." Nothing worthwhile is easy.