This page will be dedicated to showing my reflections on my third year electrical engineering project. I will be sharing my experiences; lessons learned and project progress here.
Enjoy!
Group Project 101: Meeting The Team
Hello!
Thanks for stopping by! My name is Patrobas Adewumi and I have the privilege and honour of being the project leader for team Delta in our third year Engineering project – Pulse
(Bicycle Innovation)
This is the first of the reflection series. I will be sharing my experiences; lessons learned and project progress here.
Enjoy!
I was very excited to find out that the third year electrical engineering project involves actually carrying out the tasks in bringing the project to life rather than just talking about the project and learning about the procedures and processes involved in a project development lifecycle.
I was looking forward to working with my friends or people that I had met from the previous semesters, but like in the real world, that is not the case.
Before the first lab section, my friends and I had already formed a group and sat together waiting to get further instructions, only to find out that the Professor was going to place everyone into different groups. After shuffling everyone in my lab section, I ended up being in the same team with two of my friends and three other people I had never met before the tutorial. Ever since the first introduction of the teammates, we have learnt more about each other and have been working together very effectively.
Shortly after the team introduction, we had to start considering what project we will be working on for the semester. A few of the team members, myself included, had different project ideas we were thinking about before we met. Although, this was a good thing that shows that each person was passionate about the third year engineering project and were already deliberating on what to do, it also brought about a different kind of challenge – deciding whose idea to undertake. Together, we came up with multiple different ideas that we really liked. One of my favourites, although we never pursued the project was the automatic fruit peeler. Imagine never having to peel your oranges, potatoes or cut your onions yourself, ever again! We went decided to go with the bicycle innovation.
Deciding a project team leader (group leaders for the project subsections). The team unanimously appointed me to be the project leader for Pulse. We also assigned each member of the team to head each subsections of our product for better accountability and overall result/success.
Zero To SIXTY In A PULSE
Project name and Project proposal preparation
After we decided to work on a bicycle innovation. The next challenge was to come up with a simple, yet elegant name for the project. A name that would captures the essence and utility of the project. We came up with many different names such as uber-cycle, Omnicycle 1.0, Car-cycle, Fun-cycle, project phoenix, the pulse and finally Pulse. We decided to go with pulse because it easily resonates with the mission of our project.
The goal is to create an easily installable technology for any regular bicycle so it can measure the speed, distance travelled, calories burned, green house gases saved and the heart-rate of the cyclist. Additionally, at the rear of the bicycle will be two 8x8 LED matrices used to display the turning signal, current speed of the bike and stopping lights as the cyclists decelerates. Pulse was designed to simple make your everyday bicycle more eco-friendly, athletic and safe.
Pulse – the heartbeat of future cycling….
The team was simultaneously researching how to execute the project while exploring what name would best fit the project. By the time the name was decided, we were ready for out first (proposal) presentation. My teammate, Joanna and I had to do the presentation within 2.5 minutes. We practiced for about an hour for the presentation and successfully explained our idea to the audience within the time limit. We got positive feedback from Professor Zhang and our classmates on our presentation skills and for our innovative idea.
Lessons Learned
I learned that working in a group means each person would have a little less to do since the work is shared. Since one does not have to be concern about multiple tasks at once but only a few at a time. It gives one the advantage to go into detail and work carefully on a given task. I also learned that when you work with other people, you benefit from the ideas of others because each person thinks about problems differently.
I am very fortunate to work with such hardworking and brilliant team members. So far, everything has gone so well that we got things done nicely. We are currently expecting the arrival of our parts which were ordered about a week ago.
I would not change anything about my experience in the process of meeting my teammates and deciding on what project we will be working on. This experience has helped to sharpen my teamwork and research skills.
Presentation Inspiration I
Presentation Inspiration II
The Design - PULSE
