ICE-BREAKER Weekly Reflection - Week 4

Our project status (Chee Wee Lee)

Few days ago we just got back our Gate Review 1, to us the grade is very discouraging because we spent quite a lot of time on it. From the feedback we got from Prof Brei, our main problem is actually not so much of the technical stuff, but our grammars. Now that we know our major problem, we should focus more to improve the quality of our report. To do that, everyone in our group might need to do proofreading a few times to effectively identify errors in the report, and then try to rectify all our grammar mistakes as well as improving the consistency of our report. To my surprise, all the parts in the report is very inconsistent. I am very surprise just because of the fact that we discussed and finalized most of the things before we started writing the report, but seems that few of our team member is not paying attention at all during our discussion, which is something we should work on. Besides, this week we have started another stage of our project, which is conceptualization, where we started to brainstorm ideas to attack our problem statement. It did not go so well as our team could not think out of the box. Personally I think we not uncreative, but the fact that we worry too much about whether the ideas are workable or not, makes us stuck in the box. We should really go talk to more people, especially our technical coach in order to gain more innovative ideas for our project. Lastly, we just had a group meeting on Friday. We discussed our problem in GR1 and tried to solve them, and also kind of distribute the work for the activities related to GR2, and then we planned to meet again on Monday to start working on the report together.

Exciting/interesting Finding (Ziwei Xie)

In this week, Gate Review 1 is returned. We get a lot of feedback from professor and other teams. Yesterday, we had a group meeting to discuss our shortcomings in Gate Review 1 and potential improvements that we can make in the future. During the meeting, a very good findiug was that we finally decided to focus on ice and snow issue on the car before driving. And, we will mainly deal with reducing time in moving ice and snow into around 5 minutes. This conclusion is gathered from our survey. At first, we try to set people aging from 50 – 70 to be our user group. However, from our survey, as we mainly focusing on reducing time, people aging from 30 – 40 present much more interested in our product, because they are in a hurry to drive to work everyday morning and they do care about the time and effort they need to pay. Besides, those people have ability to pay for our product.

Some more interesting findings occur in our brainstorming. We come out more than ten approaches like blowers, ice defrosting materials, moving robot and so on. One of our group members proposed an idea based on electric toothbrush. We are thinking about whether we can make a bigger device just like electric toothbrush, moving and cleaning the ice by itself. Users only need to charge it in the night. We get a lot of exciting ideas during our meeting. I do love this kind of working atmosphere.

Challenges (Yaqi Huang)

This week we got the feedback for the Gate Review 1. Now we move to the Gate Review 2. In the stage of GR2, we started to think about solutions. Each of us drew a rough idea on a blank paper and then shared with all the team members. After a discussion, we found all the rough ides had some common things. We all wanted to apply the deicer liquid to the product at somewhere. Also we’d like to use the techniques such as vibrating, heating or blowing somewhere.. And right now, we still want to do the brainstorming. We need to generate some other fresh ideas for our design. After we collected some basic ideas, the next challenge for us is to know about all the techniques. For example, how long it needs to take to melt ice by using the vibrating method. How long will it take to melt ice if we combine the heating and deicer liquid. We will study for these techniques. And in next week, we will bring this information to our technical coach. We will discuss and to see which idea is workable, which one is not. 

Future Plan (Ivan Manuel Gunawan)

After receiving our GR1 review feedback, we all agree that we need to work harder on our next Gate review and improve our English skill in our report writing. So right now we are preparing GR2 ahead of time to make sure we have the chance to review the report altogether. We set up a meeting this Friday (10/04) and start out with dividing up the work for GR2 activities among team members, and set next Monday (10/07) as our activity due date. We were also trying to be innovative in generating more solution ideas, think outside the box, and pulling whatever ideas we have on a paper without thinking too much on its technical details, just yet. Ivan and Yaqi agreed to meet coach on Monday and try to ask about the possibility of these ideas.