Group Meeting February 15th, 2010

In-O's design using the winning groups' ideas

Things we talked about during this meeting:

1. What the overall design of the structure should look like.

2. What type of sensor to use and how the different sensors affect one another

3. How children will interact with the overall structure and the individual module

First idea:

With In-O's idea, we had to alter our idea slightly from having pressure sensors (for an idea of a slide) to detect motion to produce sounds to using sound sensors to detect a presence and producing a sound in return. An echo type of effect will project throughout the structure when one sound is produced because of the ability for each module to detect a sound. 

For our idea, a microphone placed somewhere in the structure to be able to pick up the sounds the child makes. We think that a lower placed microphone might be more interesting and capable of picking up running or walking.

The problems with this idea come from trying to maximize sounds produced by acoustic means instead of relying solely on electronic components. Because none of us are especially knowledgeable in sound engineering, more research has to go into whether or not this idea is possible and especially within our capabilities.

Second idea:

Because of cost, we would not be able to make the entire module be able to detect pressure, but some how cause children to want to press the locations which have the sensors. The problem also stems from one side being more sensitive than the other depending on where the sensor is. Our original idea is to have thin layers of fiberglass sandwich the pressure sensor, but the idea of having to fix a broken pressure sensor would be nearly impossible, the idea was scrapped. 

In the end, we decided to research IR, sound, photo sensors as alternatives to the pressure sensor which allow for easier maintainability and to meet tomorrow in order to finalize our idea.