Clear skies ahead

Blue sky. This was a lot. If you don’t know what blue sky is, it is a year end project where we have to come up with an invention that would help the world in some way. We then had to make our idea into a reality through three prototypes with the final prototype being a fully working and functioning model. We were then put into one of four groups. The tweens group, the toddlers group, the pets group or the seniors group. Then it was in our groups (I was in the tweens group) that we would prepare for the exhibition. The exhibition is the night in which we all presented our inventions to the world. In our groups we would talk about and decide on a theme for the room we presented in, the layout for the room and who would bring the supplies.

my invention I wanted to do something that related to me and something that I really knew about. The first thing that came to my mind was snowboarding. I am an avid snowboarder and in the winter there is nothing I enjoy more than going up to my local mountain after school and going for laps with my friends. Once knew I was going to do something related to snowboarding I had to figure out what. Logically, I thought about what troubles I had in the past while I was just learning to snowboard. The first thing that came into my head was catching edges. I believe that this is a problem for any snowboarder starting out. Your going down the mountain perfectly fine and then all of the sudden your body jerks to the side and your face slams right into the compacted snow. I thought about how I could fix this for quite a while. I eventually came up with a rough idea although it had quite a few flaws I thought I could make it work.

Now it was time to get to work on my prototypes. My first prototype was a sketch of what I wanted my final model to look like. The problem was I had to wait on materials. My teacher Mr. Featherstone told me instead of waiting on my final models parts to come I should make another model in the mean time. These were very wise words. I made my second prototype with cheaper materials. I went up Seymour mountain to test this cheap prototype but the chairlift was closed. Looked like I had to hike up. So that’s what I did I hiked up to where there was some good snow and I tried it out. It didn’t go well. My cheap prototype was poorly attached to my board and it was to large. I had fun up there anyways though.

heres a time lapse of my second prototype

 

For my final prototype the idea was to get two equally long (about fifteen inch) pipes and to put them around the edges on the board right in the middle. To do this I had to cut the pipes length wise which is not easy at all I then had to put them on the snowboard by separating the length wise cut with my fingers and get the corner of the pipe hooked in the board. I then had to hammer the rest of the pipe on. At first I thought the pipes were good enough to stay on themselves but when it was tested they came right off. After hammering the pipes back on I filled them with an industrial grade expanding foam glue which was guaranteed to keep those pipes on. It was tested again and it worked great. Now I was ready for the exhibition.

my final prototype:


For the exhibition I worked alongside my friend Daniel because we both had snowboarding related inventions. Because the exhibition was on a Thursday, we went to school normally and then after school everyone had about two hours to prepare for the exhibition. Me and Daniel setup a snowboarding themed table and we ripped up cotton balls to look like snow. We also had a cooler full of freezies to hand out. At the exhibition I would say my table did very very well. We knew our products so well that we could answer any questions on them. We also had separate keynote presentations setup to engage the audience even more. I would say as a whole and even more so on a solo level the exhibition exceeded expectations and was an awesome, fun night for everyone.

Here’s my keynote :

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