Good evening gamers. This week was our second week in Gothenburg as part of the iSEED program, and our first week of Dare2Build (a project that counts for us as Engi 200). It was a big switch from only CADing last week and we’ve made a lot of progress so let’s sum it up.

Monday was the first day of Dare2Build. We started off with a couple of introductory presentations that introduced the project and our roles in it. We were to create an interactive learning environment for children in the wilderness that’s eco-friendly and inspired by five characters: the woodpecker, the frog, the plants, the mushroom, and the wilderness. Each would be a team, and the first four teams created a path to a story telling circle that the wilderness team creates. We were also told that we would need to hold positions of authority for at least two days and also coordinate food and fika with three others for two additional days.  Below is a map of the site we would be building, with a circle in the middle and four paths coming towards it.

I requested to be on the frog team because I thought it would be more fun to create a path that children could jump around on. I was put on frogs, and got to know my team members: Kung, two Chalmers architecture students, Myrto and Poppy,  and two student summer workers, Walter and Iman. We spent the morning getting a better sense of our goal, and came up with some preliminary ideas.

That afternoon, we got our first look at the site. It was smaller than I expected, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. While checking out our area we realized that our path was dry and the woodpecker’s was muddy, so we switched with them. We then laid out some sticks to make a basic path from the river to the circle, and measured it to be around 10 meters.

The next two days were spent listening to guest presentations and getting a more firm idea of what our design was going to be. Our initial idea was to use logs to make three separate paths with one being easy, one being medium, and one being difficult, and color code the logs. We then realized that this could divide the kids and would limit their fun, so what we ended up deciding was to have a general trend in logs going from small and close together to bigger and more spread out, similar to a tadpole growing into a frog. At the end of Wednesday we made a model of this design to get a better idea of how it looks, with the only difference between this and what we’re going to do is that we aren’t color coding anymore.

We also came up with a few additional things we could add to the path: a place where kids could observe frogs by the river, a device that would make a frog noise when you slide a stick across it, and a tent that kids could hide in and watch their friends jump across.

Thursday went a bit different. Instead of planning, the entire day was spent getting the site set up. I spent most of the day helping getting logs from where they were stored a brief drive away to the site. I’ve been pretty tired all of this week but when I got back to the hostel after Thursday I was exhausted, and was glad we didn’t have to do anymore manual labor Friday.

Friday was our final day of prepping. I spent most of it working with Iman to create a schedule and later a Gantt chart to plan out the three building weeks, while Kung worked with Walter to get a material list and Myrto made a drawing on AutoCAD.

Those five days involved a lot of working, so I was extremely ready for this weekend. We capitalized it by taking a ferry to some of the island off of Gothenburg on Saturday. We got off on at two stops, the first was a built up island that was a little too crowded for our liking (but we did find a restaurant that served some pretty good pizza). The second was much more remote, and luckily had a couple of diving boards which we jumped off of and into some very cold water. The pictures below show the ferry, Kung caught in the midst of an epic gamer moment, and our group right after jumping into the water.

The last thing I’ve spent my time on this week is our midterm for our computer aided design course. We had to make a centering attachment, aka this bad boy right here.

I worked on it a little bit throughout the week, but did the bulk of it Saturday night and all of Sunday. I took a timelapse of the timeline, which can be seen in the link below.

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All in all, a lot of work but a good week nonetheless. I’m looking forward to the second half of our trip.