The cardboard chair project was the main final project of the year. With a group, we had to design a cardboard chair with just cardboard and a 2" roll of masking tape. It had to hold one of the faculty members at our school while he preformed a series of test on the chair. We had a week to design the chair on Inventor and a week to construct the chair. Students from other classes got to vote on the chair they thought looked the best. We had to make a presentation of our whole process when designing and constructing the chair. There were 5 total parts to the grading of our chair: form, function, team assessment, presentation, and working drawings.
My main take-a-way from this project was that the process we went through is similar to what an engineer may do on a daily basis. This really allowed me to get more information to see if I want to go into the engineering field in the future. At the end of the project, I wanted to go back and make changes to make the chair even better, and that is what an engineer does. From this project, I liked that I was able to design and build something that was our own idea. There were not many things about this project that I disliked. The one thing that I didn't enjoy was going into the shop class and being on my own. Since I have never had a wood or metal shop class before, I was new to the idea of how to effectively make a product. Overall, this project was very beneficial to me to get an inside look at what an engineer does. This was defiantly my favorite project from the class.