Blog 1

 

Week 1

In week 1, we had to introduce ourselves to the class and Dr Noel and we got to know our group members better, whereby we had to list the roles and responsibility of every team member.

My group consists of:

Team leader (Tristan)🤵

-Organises meetings

-Keeps everyone on track

Scribe (Justin)✍

-Take down notes of what is being discussed in meetings to help the team stay on task

-Create documents for the team to write down our results and findings

-Organises the notes neatly for better visualisation

Photographer (Samantha)📸

-Take photos and selfies of group meetings

-Take photos of product/design every step of the way

 Team agreement:

1. Put 100% of your effort into this module🖉

2. Be punctual for all team meetings⏰

3. Help each other out when in need👬

4. Respect each other💬

5. Have fun in this module🙌

Weekly meeting time: Monday, 10am

Tuckerman's team formation model states that in order for a team to grow, to face up challenges, to tackle problems, to find solutions and to deliver results, it requires 5 necessary stages in team formation, forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. 

I agree with this team formation model as from the time I joined polytechnic to now, I have formed groups with many people for different assignments and I realised that they all turn out the same way.

When first put together in a group, the group members may feel uneasy with one another and doing projects and assignments will just be the group leader assigning work to the team members to do individually. However, as time passes, the team members may realise that they need the help of their team members to complete certain questions. When they communicate and learn to accept other viewpoints, then will they start to perform.

Week 2

In week 2, we created this blog and I was extremely surprised to find out how easy it was to set up a blog.

Next, we had to go through a learning package in order to complete the DCHE Digital Fabrication Quiz.📕 The learning package contained a lot of information that we were required to read and understand. Information such as what must be worn, what injuries we could possibly sustain, the do's and don'ts of 3D printing and laser cutting. 

This was followed up with an extremely difficult quiz where many of us struggled to score full marks on. However, with many attempts and the help from one another, we eventually completed it and could move on to the next part of the lesson.

After the quiz, we learned how are chemical engineering principles applied and how chemical products are categorised in to the following: 

-Commodities

-Molecular products

-Micro-structured products

-Chemical devices. 

We were then asked, as a group, to choose a product that fell under one of these 4 categories and we decided to use a kettle. This is because it was a household appliance and it is easy to use. Hence, this made the presentation much easier as everyone in the group understood the purpose of the product.🌊

Week 3

We went through the product design stages that all product designers have to think of when designing a product. However, in week 3, we focused on the first stage- Identifying customer needs. By recognising the customer needs, it helps the product designer decide on the properties of the products.

Recently, one of our groupmates got into a near accident. He was cycling to the MRT on a dark, rainy day. When he came across the zebra crossing, he made sure to look in the direction in which cars were coming from and sure enough he saw a car approaching. Nonetheless, he assumed that the car would stop for him and he decided to cross the road. To his dismay, the car did not stop as the driver had not seen him. Fortunately, my groupmate managed to stop in time to prevent himself from getting hit by the car.💀🚲

Initially, this heavily inspired our group to work on a chemical device that can be worn on cyclist's shirts as it will provide signals for both pedestrians and drivers to understand your actions on the road. However, after much thought, we realised that this idea was not exactly the best as we faced many problems in answering questions regarding this chemical device, hence we decided to change it. To find out more, read next weeks' blog! Here is a hint for our current chemical device:🍵

Following this activity, we went on to learn more about pain points. In summary, pain points are specific problems that the user faces when using the product and can cause them to quickly leave the product.

The common pain points can fall under 4 categories: Interaction, purchasing, compatibility and functionality. Examples of pain points are the long wait times for customer service which falls under interaction or the lack of support for certain devices or operating systems which falls under compatibility and even having confusion about payment methods which falls under purchasing.

Importance of literature review:

1. Helps the researcher assess the current state of research on the topic.

2. Identifies the experts on the topic.

3. Identifies questions that require further research of the topic.

4. Prevents inadvertent plagiarism.

Ultimately, this will give the researcher a strong foundation of knowledge in the specific topic and will provide them with confidence to continue researching in the topic.📖

Practical 1

Practical 1 was a much more fun experience when I compare it to process operation skills. In practical 1, we started off the lesson with brewing coffee and dismantling the coffee machine.

This helped us to learn many concepts related to this course that can be applied to the coffee machine such as:

-The ball found in the metal tubing in the bottom of the coffee maker prevents the steam from passing through.

-There is a heater at the bottom of the coffee machine to heat up the water

-Tissue paper can be used to measure the weight of water that had condensed in the coffee maker but did not drop into the filter paper

In the second part of the practical, we used a pump to transfer water into a measuring cylinder. We noticed that if the green tube is not submerged deep enough into the water, the water flowrate will not be high enough to be transferred into the measuring cylinder.