Now the iSEED program has come to an end, and the past one month definitely gave me some incredible experience. The program not only provided me with an opportunity to take some courses and earn credits for the Engineering Design minor out of normal school periods, but also enabled me to travel to Sweden, one of the countries in Europe I want to go the most.

 

Through the program, I took 2 courses – ENGI 355 and ENGI 200. The ENGI 355 is a CAD class for intermediate level. In the first week, we spent 8 hours every day learning and practicing CAD skills including creating 2D sketches, turning sketches into 3D shapes, using advanced modeling functions, assembling different components, etc. In the last week, we also had two 1.5 hours evening sessions to learn rendering and technical drawing. Different from the classes during normal school semesters, in which students learn several skills each week during two or three 1-hour class sessions, and have homework to practice in weekends, in our ENGI 355 session, due to the limited time we had, we learned much more skills each day and had homework every day. This had both advantages and disadvantages, but I deemed it acceptable and more effective as a way of learning CAD.

 

First of all, the homework provided us with daily practices right after learning the skills in class. As a result, we could consolidate our understanding of those skills. While in normal classes, we might forget some of the techniques when we were doing the homework some days after class since there existed a time gap between learning and practicing. For some other classes, this might be okay, but for a CAD class, it undermines the learning outcomes as practicing is crucial to mastering CAD.

 

Moreover, the daily classes ensured the continuity of the learning experience. In our classes, when we were moving on to the next technique, if a skill we learned was necessary, we didn’t need to take time to review it, since we just learned it some days ago. On the other hand, in normal classes, if we were applying a technique introduced several weeks ago and was never mentioned again thereafter, we would need time to get a revision. Thus, our classes avoided moving backward to review topics introduced before.

 

Even though the compact schedule of the classes led to a heavy workload that I had limited spare time during the first week, I thought it was normal for a study abroad program with 6 credit hours in 4 weeks. Except for the workload, I appreciated this way of CAD learning as it maximized learning outcome in a short period of time.

 

The ENGI 200 course was integrated with Chalmers’ Dare To Build project. Although the project involved both engineers and architects, I still got the chance to conduct the process of engineering design by making a decision-making matrix and a Gantt chart, and had a very different experience from freshman design by communicating and collaborating with people from another field.

 

In the design process, I realized that effective communication was even more important than that in freshman design. All the members of my freshman design team were engineers, and when we were exchanging and evaluating ideas, we focused mostly on the technical side of the design. However, in ENGI 200, our group consisted of both engineers and architects, and we all had different focuses on a design idea. The architects emphasized more on the visual effect of the design, and the engineers stressed more on the feasibility of the idea. Thus, we would need to balance both aspects of the design. Specifically, our design was required to have places up in the tree for woodpeckers to perch on and applications of biomimicry from them. We had an idea to create some attachments with shapes of the feet of woodpeckers to fix a log to the tree. The two architects thought that would be perfect if we could support the log only using several pieces with shapes of woodpeckers’ feet. On the other hand, I, and the other engineer, were very concerned about the stability of the structure and argued that it would be extremely difficult to achieve the goal. After some lively discussions, we came up with an idea which involved the feet attachment and ropes tied around the tree for additional support. This demonstrated the importance of communication in a group of people from different fields. Without such communication, it would be impossible to have a design that satisfied the requirements from all the fields. As I will probably work with people who have different backgrounds from me, this experience definitely strengthened my capability to handle such situation well.

 

In the construction phase, however, I think we should improve our flexibility. Our design consisted of many logs of different heights connected together which needed to be placed firmly on the ground. It was harder than we thought to achieve this at the site since the ground was not flat. It took us very long time to place and attach all the logs. As a result, we started to prototype other parts of our design on the last day of week 3 (my last day on site), and had very limited time to construct them. Since fixing the logs is a repeatable task with some general steps, we should be more flexible that we should dedicate less time to place the logs in the first 2 weeks of construction and put more effort into prototyping other parts. Consequently, we would have more time for prototyping. Once we had the prototypes done in the first 2 weeks, we could just construct the designs in the last week.

 

Through the past month, the iSEED program has enhanced both my hard skills and soft skills. I acquired CAD modelling capability, improved communication skills, and had a deeper understanding of the importance of flexibility to team work. This was a fantastic study abroad program.

 

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.

On Sunday, after I finished the ENGI 355 midterm, I went out to explore Gothenburg more. I went to the Skansen Kronan Fortress. It is built up on a small hill within 10 minutes’ walk from our hostel. I climbed up the hill, and saw the fortress constructed with stones which has a golden crown on top of the roof. The fortress is the highest point in downtown Gothenburg. Viewing from the point, I got a great view of the city with buildings of white walls and red roofs. Later I went to a self-service Chinese cafeteria, and got some authentic Chinese food. This was my first time here to have some food from my home country.

The construction phase of Dare to Build officially started on Monday. We mainly focused on some preparations on this day. Together with several other students, I was tasked to build a sawhorse as a log cutting station. We came up with a rough design, and began construction. However, it was much more difficult then I thought when we moved to building. We had to make sure that the legs of supports of the sawhorse had equal lengths, and that the connection of two legs was wide enough for a bolt to secure the screw through the hole at the connections. We spent a long time to build the first support, and after we got more familiar with the construction, we sped up and adapted the pipeline technique. Specifically, a group of people cut the wood, and another group chiseled the cutting to create the connection. Finally, we succeeded to make four supports for two sawhorses, and we tested by cutting one log on them so that they were strong enough for the intense log cutting task in the following days.

On Tuesday, we worked on prototyping the woodpecker path next to the circle. In our design, there would be several logs of different heights connected together from the height up to 2 meters to the height of the center circle so as to create a descending path for woodpeckers to land from the trees to the circle. As a group, we cut logs of 1, 1.5, and 2 meters together and tried to connect them with rope. However, since the ground was not flat, even though we could fix the logs with rope, we were not able to stabilize the whole structure as it would fall to one side. After a group discussion, we figured out a solution that we would have several logs as the frame of our structure, and they would be connected with each other by sticks screwed onto them. Then, we would fill in the frame with other logs screwed to the sticks as well. By this way, we would have a stable frame with only a few logs which we could build on it afterwards.

Wednesday was an exhausting day. In the morning, we specified our design that we would have gravels underneath the structure to provide more support to it. In the afternoon all the groups except for the Wilderness stopped their construction and helped to unload the gravels to the site and dump them on the paths. I switched between roles of shoveling the gravels to wheel barrel and moving the wheel barrel to specified spots of the site. With doing the work all the afternoon, I estimated that I might have unloaded more than 200 kilograms of gravels myself. This was absolutely an intense workout.

On Thursday we were still playing with gravels. We unloaded more of them, and spread the rest of them evenly on the path down to the site. After we finished this, the whole circle and the paths except for the plants were covered with at least 5 cm of gravels. This was a really a tough task for us. After lunch we worked more on the woodpecker path. We screwed some shorter logs to the frame, and also added more support to the frame by screwing logs to some sticks placed deep in the ground. We had some interesting games to help know about each other better as our finishing of the week.

Friday was the midsummer holiday. However, the weather was not as great as I expected. In the afternoon I went to take a look at a huge sailing ship which I saw one day on my way to the site. I felt very disappointed that it was not a museum. I also passed a museum with several warships and a submarine on my way back. Unfortunately, it was closed as everyone was enjoying the holiday.

Saturday was the exciting day. We set off early to Copenhagen, Denmark. It took four hours and a half on a bus to get there. After lunch we went to explore Copenhagen. We went to freetown Chrstiania, which was a place with some weird things happening. We also had some drinks in a historical area not far from our hostel. There were much more tourists in Copenhagen than in Gothenburg, and many people were enjoying themselves on sailing boats along the complicated canal system there. After that we went to a place with many food trucks to have dinner. It was an awesome relaxation for all of us after the intense building week.

On Sunday morning I went to the famous Little Mermaid Statue, and it was one of the most disappointed and overrated places I have been to. The statue was much smaller, and there were much more people than I thought. It was kind of awkward when more than one hundred tourists were holding their phones and cameras against a statue of a girl’s size. Just next to the statue, there is a fortress called Kastellet with a shape of star and is separated with the land by a moat. I walked along the boundary of the fortress and got some nice pictures. Then I went to the Amalienborg, and watched the royal guards switching. There is a large square surrounded by several palaces and a magnificent statue stands in the middle. Watching the royal guards switching was fun experience. The guards were wearing traditional uniforms and swords, but were also carrying modern automatic rifle guns. Later on, we went to the Statens Museum for Kunst to see some European style art paintings, and went around a botanical garden nearby. We set off on the bus at 5 and arrived in Gothenburg at 9:30. Even though we only stayed in Copenhagen for one day and a half, we still had some awesome experiences here, and I love this city very much.