STEM kits made for high school attendees of the workshops held as part of the IEEE Women in Engineering International Leadership Summit in Auckland on December 12th, 2023.
Background
The IEEE Women in Engineering International Leadership Summit (WIE ILS) for 2023 was held in Auckland, New Zealand on December 11th-12th. As part of the Student Activities committee, I helped coordinate with local STEM groups (such as Robogals Auckland, a club I was an executive member of in 2022-2023!) to organise workshops for up to 100 high school students. Our committee also wanted to organise take-home kits for these HS students, so I volunteered to design and build kits from scratch to create something unique, creative, and (hopefully) less expensive than getting pre-built kits. More information about the Summit can be found here.
My desired aspects of the kits, and thus my goals with the project, were as follows:
Interactive aspect(s) to engage and excite,
Educational aspect(s) related to electrical engineering or a similar discipline,
Branded to align with the Summit, and
Encourages students to be creative with the kits and take them further.
Additionally, although I wasn't given a specific budget to work with, I did want to keep it under $1000 NZD total to build all 100 kits.
I spent a little over two weeks in November doing the bulk of the prototyping and assembly before handing it off to the chair of our committee to finish assembly before the conference (since I was flying out to Singapore for the remainder of the year). I started ideating for this a month or so prior, and because I love the creative design process, I wanted to showcase how I took this project from idea to reality in the form of my messy sketches, CAD models and questionable soldering skills. Feel free to read on if you're curious to see more!
Although this was a pretty self-led project, I definitely wouldn't have gotten it done without the help of our committee chair (and good friend) Sarina, the staff at the university who assisted with giving me lab and equipment access, and other organising members of the Summit who helped me with ordering everything I needed. Thank you to all of those people for helping me bring this project to life!
Brainstorming & Prototyping -> Final Design
The inspiration for everything started when I was trying to figure out the Heng Balance lamp worked (you know, the one with the oval and the two balls that look like they're defying gravity when they're in the "on" position). Photo attached to jog your memory:
As I was looking up how to create closed circuits with magnets like that, I stumbled upon the reed switch: a tiny switch with two ferromagnetic leads that, in close proximity to a magnet, will move towards each other and close the switch (if it's Normally Open). I never found out how the lamp worked because this reed switch put me down a rabbit hole and ended up giving me the inspiration for the STEM kits. I liked the idea of having a light be magnet-operated: it allows students to "physically" turn on or off something tangible (an LED) by moving a magnet closer or farther away almost as if by magic (but it's science and effective engineering!), thus giving me the interactive and educational components I was looking for.
I bought a miniature glass reed switch to try it out myself, and from there, I began sketching possible light casing designs that could be 3D printed or constructed with cheap materials. The acrylic light stand idea came from seeing other friends at university make their own out of LED strips, clear acrylic and wooden bases, and also seeing similar projects online. I tentatively pursued the idea, unsure if a single LED would be able to light up a small sheet of engraved acrylic in an effective way. I came up with a backup plan just in case where the LED could stick through its casing to form the dot of the "i" (apparently called a tittle) in the WIE logo.
Through sketching, I also began planning out the circuit, calculating the resistor value I needed, and coming up with different battery options to figure out which would be most inexpensive. I then created some CAD models based on my sketches in Autodesk Inventor and 3D printed them for prototyping. After soldering the circuit onto some scored and cut perfboard, lasercutting and engraving some logos onto 3mm acrylic, and putting all the components together, I had a working magnet-operated light stand prototype. I made a few final adjustments (mostly small dimension fixes for the 3D printed parts) before coming up with the final design. Images from these phases, from brainstorming and prototyping to the final design, are shown below.
Initial sketches and brainstorming:
Material research and circuit planning:
Files for lasercutting and 3D printing:
Alternative design in case a single LED was unable to light up the acrylic effectively:
Final working prototype:
Final design for "mass production":
Pictures from mass-assembling over one hundred of the kits:
Materials Used
The materials I used are as follows (with links included to NZ sites for purchase):
I also used the following tools at my university:
Soldering iron + solder
Pliers (for bending component leads and splitting perfboard)
Utility knife (for scoring perfboard)
Wire strippers and cutters (for reducing the battery holder wire length if desired)
3D printer
Lasercutting machine
In case you want to build your own, I've included the following files in my GitHub here:
.ai file with logos (can replace logos with your own designs)
.ipt files if you want to adjust any dimensions, etc.
.stl files for 3D printing
educational pamphlet I included with each kit (see below)
Since many of these items were available to use for free at my university, I only had to purchase the reed switches, batteries, battery holders and magnets, keeping the total cost of each kit under $8 NZD.
Educational Pamphlet
The final addition to the take-home kits was an educational pamphlet I designed and wrote. Through this, I hoped to teach students about the science behind the reed switches, how the circuit works, and how to assemble the kits. I've included the file for the pamphlet in my GitHub above, but I've also attached images of the pamphlet below:
And that's it! I hope you enjoyed reading about my process creating these kits — feel free to use my files to make your own if you're interested! I had a lot of fun putting these together (despite the pain my hands and head occasionally suffered from scoring perfboard and soldering). I cannot thank Sarina and the university staff enough for helping me put these together — thank you for the trust and for your own hard work in bringing my vision to life!
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