My essential question is how can we make something that truly will help Tim, and what can we focus on and how can we use his body to really understand what we are making. What I mean by that is what can we focus on that will actually help him, because if he has a lot of strength in his arms then we would focus on his legs or vice versa.
When we started this project my group and I wanted to focus and making something for Tim so be able to get off the couch. But after some brain storming and tries we realized we kept coming up with the same result as the other groups. So we took a step back and thought “what else can we do?”. So we came up with a handle we will glue onto a coffee mug, because we remembered Tim saying his hands were shaky. I think it’s meaningful because it shows we really did listen because we caught that his hands were shaky. Its meaningful to Tim because I hope he can see all the work we put into it.
One of the small questions i asked was what movements can people with huntington’s do. I started off with this so I could really understand more what Tim was able to do and what he wasn’t. I think that this question actually really helped me to understand huntington’s more because I also learned more just about what it is and some symptoms.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/huntingtons-disease/symptoms-causes/syc-20356117
My second source was Tim and Nikola. I learned a lot from our FaceTime calls with them. I learnt that Tim was shaky. After me and my group came up with our new idea for the cup we had to ask Tim if he drink tea or coffee or there would not really be a point to make the handle. We learnt that he drinks and enjoys both. I also could reflect a lot about what Nikola said Tim could do and not because she would most likely know the most.
-Tim
-Nikola
The last question was how does it affect the brain. For this question I have 2 sources. One is from a website and the other one is Nikola. She was able to kind of explain to me how it affects the brain but I still had some questions so I had to do some more research. After this I found out that it affects the motor movement called the basal ganglia.
https://hopes.stanford.edu/the-basic-neurobiology-of-huntingtons-disease-text-and-audio/
-Nikola
It helps me answer my big question witch was “how can we make something that truly will help Tim, and what can we focus on and how can we use his body to really understand what we are making”. The research helps me because I needed to really understand how he can move and what works for him and what doesn’t because I didn’t want to do all this work for something he didn’t need help with.
So at first when we realized we wanted to make something else we started brainstorming. We defined that we wanted to make a handle. We needed to discover if Tim even drank out of a cup and around what size his hands are, we also got the idea to ask what size ring he wears because that would help us. We started envisioning what we wanted to make but we had a hard time actually putting into TinkerCad. We then started to try a few different designs and options. We then came up with a final product on TinkerCad. Right now we are in the middle of figuring out what we need ti make this. We haven’t done a debrief yet because we are’t done.
My critical questions were: what is Tim able to move and were does he have strength? Then I asked How does this affect the brain? Finally I asked What does Tim need help with?
I learnt how to use Teams because I have never used it before. I also learnt how to use TinkerCad and I have never used anything like it so it was cool to see. TinkerCad was actually not to hard to use, so that was good!
I didn’t just one website I would check a few to make sure the information was repeated and made sense. And for Nikola I trust her because she lives with someone who lives with it so she would know.
For next time I would probably wanna be less shy on the call with Tim to make sure I wasn’t left with any questions in the end. I also wish I worked a bit harder and used my class time a bit better, not that I wasted my time I just wasn’t always 100% focused. But overall looking back at this whole experience i’m actually really happy with our final product.