Electrical Innovation Project

When I was a little kid, I watched a movie called “Wall-E.” In the movie, all the people were unable to walk due to overconsumption of food relative to their level of exercise. Lately, I have been noticing that a growing number of people are starting to look a little bit like the people of “Wall-E.” My observation is supported by facts stated by the World Health Organization[1]; one of the facts stated on their website is that “Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975.”

Define

People are eating more and more, and getting less and less exercise, and studies[2] show obesity is becoming a big problem in todays society. But it would be crazy to think that a grade nine student could solve the obesity problem using one simple circuit. So, I am narrowing it down to portion control of healthy foods. Even if you are eating healthy foods, you are still able to become overweight. Just eating a ton of things can lead to obesity, especially if they are high in calories.

Dream

When I was brainstorming, I thought up 4 different ideas to help the problem of obesity that include simple circuits.

The first one I thought of was making a website for people to connect and share their experiences and what they are doing to better their eating habits. But this requires making a website, not a simple circuit. I continued to brainstorm all kinds of ideas and writing them down no matter how far-fetched they seemed.

Another idea that resulted from my brainstorming was to create some kind of “reward” system. In this case I thought that because people are so often eating out and getting take-out, I could incentivize making your own meals from home using your own kitchen. The way I would do this is by having a reward, like a cookie, dispense whenever you finished making a meal. But this contradicts the issue that I am trying to solve. The cookie would not be a good reward and instead of trying to think up another reward, I moved on to my next idea.

The next idea was using a “micro:bit” (which is a small computer chip that is programmable using block coding) to display a face on the door of your refrigerator that would change expressions based on the contents of the fridge. For example, if you were stowing away a cake and some cookies, the face on the micro:bit would change to be a sad face. And if the contents of the fridge included things like broccoli, apples, oranges, cheese, and eggs the face would change to a happy face. But if a mixture of healthy and no so healthy  choice foods were in the fridge it would have a neutral expression.

My fourth idea while brainstorming was to make a bulb go off and a ding sound to be made whenever it was time for you to go to the gym. The way I would make this is by hooking a micro:bit up to a bulb (because the micro:bit lights are not very bright) and program it so that it would wait for many, many seconds, and when it finished counting down, it would play a tone and light the bulb for 30 seconds. My final idea and the one that I ended up settling on was a food scale to measure your food.

Deliver

My food scale is a simple circuit where the platform holding the food is a conductor because it’s made out of metal. As soon as the metal platform touches a terminal of the battery, the circuit is complete, allowing electricity to flow through the circuit resulting in a lightbulb turning on. The lightbulb will turn on at whatever weight the platform is calibrated for. For example, it could turn on when the metal platform is holding 150 grams of chicken, which is an average serving size for an adult.

Something to note is that the scale is light enough to be carried in your hand, although it can be tricky to hold the wires, battery, and bulb. The scale is not very big with the platform’s size just large enough to hold the average dinner plate. The scale is made up of three parts, the base, the platform, and the springs. The base is what everything is built upon. There are four springs sprouting out of the top of the base connected to the weighing platform. The tension in the springs is what is used to calibrate the scale for different foods. Grey is the primary color used for the scale with slightly different shades for each of the three different parts. The wires are made of copper, insulated with a black rubber, and the battery is easily interchangeable if it dies. Below is a drawing of my scale:

Since this idea for an invention is around a week old, there are bound to be some things that could be improved upon in its design. For example, running a wire underneath the weighing platform instead of using the platform as a conductor could make it easier for the battery’s terminal to be touched by something. Another issue with the invention is that it is all up to you if you want to use it or even follow what it says.

Debrief

Many things did and did not go well while working on this project. First let’s start with the good things. Number one, our group choose a solution to the problem very quickly, so we were able to get started on the project and did not have to mull over options for very lone. As well as picking a solution, finding pictures from Pexels.com (copyright-free images) went fairly quickly. A third thing that went well was when we were building proof-of-concept circuit (to demonstrate that the concept will actually work). We had no problem building it and the bulb lit during our first test. Below is a picture the circuit. The two yellow clips represent the switch of the scale:

Now for some of the not so great things that happened during this project. The worst part of this project for me was that I was not able to meet with my teammates in-class due to having a bad head cold. This meant that I did not get most of the in-class instructions for the project and I had to work with what I could find online, and even from what I did find, it was still difficult to understand what was actually needed of me due to there being two rubrics and another set of instructions. On the day that I found out what my group was doing for the project (food scale), we did not get very much time to work in-class before we started our next lesson. So, because I did not get much face-to-face time with my team, I discovered later that I missed out on some of the details of our invention. Another issue I needed to work-out was finding something to make the product unique, that would differentiate it from the other products already available. The way that I did this was by adding a way to calibrate the springs for different kinds of foods.

This project helped me learn that no idea is a bad idea. When brainstorming I wrote down whatever ideas came to mind, no matter if they could be done with a simple circuit or not. I also learned how to properly format edublog posts with proper text alignment. Finally, this was a great project because I got to collaborate with my classmates and had fun doing it.

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5129778/