I was in the Fika group on Monday, and I found it was not an easier task than on-site construction. In the morning we went to the grocery store to buy all the food needed. We planned to bake some cakes for the morning Fika and cook pasta for lunch. Right after the morning Fika, we started to prepare the lunch. I was responsible for cooking the spaghetti, and other group members were preparing the sauce. It took me a long time to cook all the spaghetti as we were preparing lunch for over 30 students that were extremely hungry after morning’s hard work on site. I really enjoyed the lunch we cooked, and felt a great sense of fulfillment from it.

On Tuesday, we continued on the construction of the woodpecker path near the circle. We built from the front of the structure by filling the space in the frame we built last week with more logs. To fix the logs filled in, we added some sticks between them and other logs that have already been attached. We also tried to arrange these sticks in triangle or parallelogram grids so as to achieve a stable structure. Furthermore, we dug a whole about 5 meters away from the rear of the frame and filled in with gravels to build the back section of our structure on top. Basically, the back section was similar to the front section that we would have logs of different heights attached together and also a log bridge to connect with the front section. Since every log and stick have different lengths and diameters, it was a very time-consuming task to fix the logs and attach them with sticks in right positions. Throughout the day, we have finished the first one-third of the structure at the front, and also almost finished the structure at the back section.

We kept working hard on our structure on Wednesday. In the front section, we attached the highest log of 2.2 meters, and also several lower logs higher than 1.2 meters around it. We finished the back section as well with fixing a highest log of 2 meters. After school, I spent several hours working on the presentation as we would have the midway inspection on Thursday.

On Thursday morning, we had the midway inspection. All the Rice students presented their project. In my presentation, I mainly talked about the motivation of the project, the problem we would need to solve, the design criteria we set, the conceptual designs, the prototypes we have built so far, successes and limitations of our design, and some future work to do. After listening to all the presentations, I got clearer about the designs and current progresses of other groups. After the inspection, we went down to the site and started to work, as we were expecting to finish both the front and back section of our structure except for the integration with the storytelling circle at the front. Finally, we managed to achieve this goal. By the end of the day, we had the front and back section done, and we set up and fix the log bridge that connects both sections. After class, we went to a lake near the site to have fun together.

Friday was my last day in the Dare To Build project. On this day, we finished the last part of our structure, which was the integration with the circle that we had some logs of the same height of the circle attached to our structure. Moreover, we started prototyping other designs. Specifically, we built a prototype of the sound creation tool that applies biomimicry to imitate the pecking sound of woodpeckers. We also built the gripping structure used for attaching a log on trees for woodpeckers to perch. Although it was a pity that I couldn’t stay until the end of the project, it was still an incredible experience for me to work with those excellent architects and engineers, and it definitely strengthened my capability to collaborate well with people from another field.