Learning Launch

Challenge and Selection   I am a student of engineering and I´m part of a team at my school where we need to design,  manufacture, and build an off-road vehicle that must survive some tests in rough terrain with mud  and rocks, so the challenge that I choose is the making of some components in our vehicle, more  specifically I choose the panels that protects the engine and brake system. This element needs to  be light but hard so they can resist trough all the test without breaking or falling.

After understanding the problematic or challenge that we have the best option to approach it is the  learning launch because we must think several ideas for the material and design, then we will make  a prototype and based in that we can see if it works properly or something needs to be changed so  the needs of the problematic is solved and if not, we will repeat the process.

Application

For the first learning launch cycle, we focused on the investigation and selection of the material to  use on the element; after comparing some materials we end up with two options, one made from  aluminum and the other some type of cardboard material, we made rough test to both of them to  see which one is better for our challenge; after the test we observe that the aluminum was the best  option and the next question was, which would be the best design to solve our problem?

To answer this question, we started a brainstorm of ideas of how the design could and should be,  we conclude that the best option is to make the panel in the same figure or pattern of the chassis  in our vehicle, after we made them we did rough tests again but the mud and some little rocks were  entering into our vehicle, to solve it we had to analyze why was that happening and changing our  design, finally we weld the edges of the panels and repeat the process of tests and we could solve  our problem.

Insight and Approach

By applying the learning launch step, we realize that it was very helpful for us to choose the most  adequate solution, for example we didn’t think of welding the edges of the panels until we saw  that even after we made the design in the exact same geometry of the chassis it wasn’t working as  it should be, this allowed us to think of more ideas and find best possible solutions.

In more components of our project, I think that this is the best tool because we need to make tests  and compare results to make better decisions, but we can also apply Mindmaping at the very start  of our project to make a scheme of all the components, ideas for the design and essential things.

