Reflections

It has been very tough going through this project. We found that it was indeed much harder to think of original ideas, and to have to balance school work with the making of our prototype was very difficult. We also had to deal with having to change our project idea, which made it all the more worse. I don't think any of us expected it to be this hard, yet it has been a good learning experience for all of us.

I think we could have improved a little more on communication as many times, we were confused about the specifics of the prototype and how it was supposed to work. If we had cleared up any misunderstandings beforehand, our project would have gone a lot smoother.

In addition, one more thing which could have been improved on was the distribution of work. Several times, we had two group mates working on the same thing without alerting one another, and work distribution was also rather uneven.

I think that all of us have learnt much from this experience, and hopefully we will be able to clear the semi-finals despite the challenges we have faced!

Making of the product

For the product, we used around 3 hours before finally figuring out how the shape of the product would be like. Construction of the product was simple, as we only needed to acquire a fish scaling tool, and then attach the cover to it. The cost of our product was around $1.70, way cheaper than at what other shops sell.

Picture of product

This is a picture of our prototype, not yet 100% completed. We are still making edits to the prototype to make it look better aesthetically.

Change in project

Leading up to the IVP seminar, we met several times in order to discuss the path which our project would take, and the necessary parts such as the battery, motor and watch straps. We also went our twice to get all the materials we required. After some thinking about the feasibility of the project, we changed our prototype to that of a heart rate detector which would send an alarm to the user's handphone via a software to wake the person up. We changed our idea because our original idea required too much power and was not very easy to make. However, our new idea was quickly shot down as being too extravagant and taking too many unnecessary steps. It was also recommended by our IVP mentors that we change our project idea, therefore after the IVP seminar we made the difficult decision to change our project idea.

We noticed that when scaling fish, the fish scales tend to be very hard to clean up and can be found all over the place. This creates a potential hygiene problem and also wastes large amounts of time to throw away the scales. There is also no current invention which allows for the easy storage of fish scales. Therefore, we have decided to base our new project around a knife which can allow for the easy storage of fish scales whilst scaling the fish.

Our invention will be small and compact, as well as featuring an easy way to keep fish scales. It is targeted at people who scale fish regularly, and we believe that out invention can help this people, even in a small way.