Blue Sky Exhibition 2017

       For those of you who don’t know Blue Sky is a thing we do in PLP where you have to come up with a problem and make a solution for it. If you would like to learn more about it I recommend you read one or two have my past blogposts on it. There is the Star Wars one, the Spring 2016 one, and the Harry Potter one. We had to follow the launch cycle to make the project that consisted of 7 steps. 

       For blue sky the first part of the launch cycle is to look, listen, and learn. I had to find a problem that sparked my curiosity and made me want to work on it. The hard part about this was that the problem had to be for Babies, Toddlers, Tweens, Elders, or Pets. I went around and asked some of my family members and friends if they had any problems. My Aunt said that her cat is very active at night and wakes her up while she’s sleeping. I have slept over at my aunts house many times and her cat always jumps on the bed and wakes me up. I started thinking about this and I was very intrigued because I too had cats that are very active at night. I then did a little research and found out that tons of people have problems with cats at night. I did a little more research and found out that there wasn’t really any solution for this problem so I knew I wanted to do it. I was very excited to get started.

       After I had found my problem it was time to ask questions. I went around and asked family and friends with cats what bad things their cats do at night. A very common problem was that the cats wanted to play and would jump on their owners beds to wake them up. One of my friends even said that their cat learned how to open the door to their bedroom to wake them up. Another common problem was that the cats were very loud and would make a lot of noise running around. While the cats were running around at night they would also commonly make a mess. My cats used to take the toilet paper out of the bathroom and shred it up while we were asleep. Another question I asked was “what have you done to try and stop your cat from disturbing your sleep?” And most people hadn’t done anything. One of my friends said they took away all of their cats toys but the cat just found other household objects to play with that made even more noise. Once I had asked all the questions I needed to I started to research.  

         To help understand my problem I had to do a lot of research. I researched what causes cats to act the way they do. The top reason was because they are normally very active animals at night and have not adapted to the live sod their owners. I also researched to find ways other people have tried to fix this problem. There weren’t very many solutions but the few I found didn’t seem to work very well. I learned that a common way to try and solve the problem was playing with your cat a lot during the day so it was more tired at night. After my research I still had a few questions so I decided to ask and expert. I contacted my friend Angela’s mom who is a veterinarian and owns an animal hospital. She was very helpful and answered all of my questions clearly. It was good to get help from and expert because they knew a lot of things that I could find on the internet. She also gave me a very good idea for how I can solve the problem. 

       After all of the research I had to come up with a way to solve my problem. I decided that the best way to keep cats calm at night was to tire them out. It seemed to be the best solution to keep cats more calm at night. My first idea was to make a cat treadmill or something similar to that but I thought that might be dangerous. I decided I was going to make a toy that can keep cats entertained when the owner can’t. I also wanted it to be able to be used day or night so I wanted it to be quiet. I was going to have to make something that could be set up and be used for hours so I knew it was going to have to be very appealing for cats. The hard part about this was going to be keeping the cat entertained for a long period of time. Cats love a lot of different toys but can lose interest in them very quickly. I got an idea for the main body of the toy and then quickly came up with things I could add on to make it more appealing. After that I was ready to start my first prototype.

       My idea was to make a cat toy that could move around and the cat could chase. I wanted to make it simulate prey because that is how cats use their energy in the wild. The first thing I had to do was get the main body for the toy. I didn’t know how to make anything like that and I didn’t have enough time to learn how so I looked for something I already had to use. I found a plastic caterpillar in my garage that moved on its on and even had a censor in it so it could turn away from walls. The next step was to add on stuff to make it more appealing to cats. First I cat a laser pointer and glued it on to the back. After that I got some spirals made it of felt and attached them to the back of the caterpillar with string. Once that was done I was ready to test it out on my first client. 

       I took my first draft to my aunt and uncles house to test it on their cat smudge. I turned it on and let it go. Smudge seemed very interested in it but just watched it and didn’t try to get it. The laser light that I attached to the main body messed up the balance so it fell over a lot. It was too heavy and the cat seemed too scared of it to play with it. I decide for my second prototype I needed to take a step back and make it more simple. I removed the laser and the spirals. I then attached just one spiral to its back with a string but it still messed up the balance and it wouldn’t turn. I then glued one spiral to the top of the body and it worked fine. I then took it back to my aunt and uncles house and let them use it that night. They reported back to me the next day that it was still going when they woke up but smudge had seemed to lose interest in it a while before. They continued to use it throughout that day and smudge would play with it every now and then but would get bored of it quickly. For my final draft I needed to make it way more interesting.

       When I got the toy back I took the spiral of of the body and started fresh. The problem with the toy was the cat was losing interest in it very quickly. I needed to make it more appealing. I started off with trying to make it look more like actual prey. I tried painting it but the paint wouldn’t stay on. I then glued feathers on to it and it looked like after that I reapplied the spiral too its back. It looked way better than it did before but I was still worried that cats might loose interest in it very quickly. I had to add something that cats were really attracted to so I decided to add some cat nip. I didn’t want it to be super noticeable so the cats would have to use the toy before they found it. I put the cat nip under the feathers to hide it. I gave the toy back to my aunt and uncle and they said smudge loved it. They tested it out for a few nights and were not woken up once. 

       The final step of my project was to show it to the world. To show it to the world I was going to display it at the blue sky exhibition. I made a poster board with all of the information. It told people about each of the prototypes and the changes made to each. It also had pictures of each of the prototypes. I recorded a video of my cat playing with the toy and displayed that. I also had a video of cats being active at night without any toy to show people the difference. At the exhibition night I was in a group of people who also did projects on pets. The theme for our area was a pet store. We had many pet toys for decoration and an adoption centre where you could take home a stuffy. We had a game for our section where you had to find differnt pictures of animals hidden on differnt projects. I had a picture of a golden retriever on my project. We also had brownies, gummies, and animals crackers for food, and sprite to drink. The exhibition went great and many people enjoyed my project. All of the projects in my section were so cool and everyone really enjoyed our section. I also enjoyed going around to the other sections and viewing other projects. It was a very successful Blue Sky Exhibition