This post is about the project that has just concluded, which is the Scimatics 8 Ultimate Design Challenge project. Summarized, this project required us to design a 3D object in Tinkercad, a website where you can design 3D objects, either for maximum surface area, or maximum volume. We would then 3D print those objects, which as of writing, has not happened yet. I’ll now tell you all about the project and the design process.
When I first learnt of this project through Basecamp, I was slightly concerned; the last project, Chemistry coding, was mainly focused on science concepts, so I anticipated this project to be more focused on math ( It was ). Luckily for me, this was a co-op project, and my partner was Patrick, who has also written a blog post on this Here.
When Patrick and I started working together, we didn’t really have a object in mind that we wanted to design. We brainstormed for a bit, and found that we both wanted to make something form the Halo series. We did more brainstorming. We eventually decided upon a ATV vehicle called a warthog. It was open, and prioritized the seating and flat storage, so we decided to design it for maximum surface area.
Once our model was approved, we had to move onto calculations. Patrick handled 85% of the calculations, so all credit goes to him.
Our model had a wide variety of shapes, some with formulas for calculation we hadn’t learnt about yet. This required us to make a model that was understandably recognizable, yet at the same time we could make accurate calculations with. The mathematically recognizable model we made was not pretty by any means necessary, but it was reliable for calculations. Plus, we could print the original model, not the mathematical model.
Patrick handled all the other calculations, calculating surface area, volume, ratio, etc. He did a phenomenal job.
The last part of this project was the presentation. We put together the presentation in relatively little time, but realized that we probably came with too few slides when the first presentations had 20+ slides in them ( we had 8 ). It wasn’t really an issue though, as we got all the information we needed displayed in the presentation.
To conclude this short blog post, I will answer the driving question for this project, which is:
“ How can we design an object to optimize its shape? “
The answer to this question can easily be found in our work. The object we made was one that either was optimized for maximum surface area or volume, so that basically answers the question. I suppose we could also optimize a vehicle for maximum mass, but that’s a different subject.
To conclude, I believe that this project has shown me a good example/ introduction to mathematical 3D shapes and their calculations. While I may not be the best at math, I believe that this was a fun and interesting project.