HELLO, WORLD

A team of international students and I were tasked to build a museum exhibit for the Children's Museum of Houston that would teach children the basics of computational thinking. We built an interactive maze that would teach children algorithmic thinking and debugging skills.

​

Before a child places a ball into one of the top three holes, they are meant to prearrange the adjustable components into a prearranged path to lead the path to one of the colored gates. Upon reaching the bottom, the pentagons will light up in the assigned color. This taught the concepts of algorithmic thinking by leading children to "code" a path for the ball to reach the bottom. It also taught debugging skills when the child would have to adjust the path when the ball did not reach the bottom at the first attempt.

​

We learned and utilized a lot of skills with this project, including CAD design, laser cutting, 3D printing, basic electronics, and working through the iterative nature of the Engineering Design Process.

​

You can watch a video of how it works here!

(Note: this video depicts an early and incomplete prototype)