Project Readiness Package Rev 7/22/11
Administrative Information:
· Project Name (tentative): / Lip Balm/Hand Salve Assembly Line· Faculty Champion: (technical mentor: supports proposal development, anticipated technical mentor during project execution; may also be Sponsor)
Name / Dept. / Email / PhoneDr. Debartolo / ME /
For assistance identifying a Champion: B. Debartolo (ME), G. Slack (EE), J. Kaemmerlen (ISE), R. Melton (CE)
· Other Support, if known: (faculty or others willing to provide expertise in areas outside the domain of the Faculty Champion)
Name / Dept. / Email / PhoneSarah Brownell / DDM / / 585-330-6434
· Project “Guide” if known:
· Primary Customer, if known (name, phone, email):
Rochester Roots, Jan McDonald, , 585-802-0843
· Sponsor(s): (provider(s) of financial support)
Name/Organization / Contact Info. / Type & Amount of Support CommittedJan McDonald - RR / TBD
Mark Smith - MSD / $800
Project Overview:
Rochester Roots began in 1975. It is a not for profit program with a focus on increasing the sustainability and fairness of the food system. Some of the goals of the Rochester Roots program include creating a food secure community by improving access to locally grown produce, teaching the beneficial effects of sustainable agriculture through gentle use of natural resources so they are not depleted or damaged, encouraging development of local family gardens as well as creating city schoolyard gardens that allow students to come together and learn about agriculture. Through all of this, they hope to create a food secure community in the city of Rochester [1].
Rochester Roots tasked RIT’s engineering students to create fun, unique projects to involve kids in sustainable agriculture and enhance the students’ education based on the common core with a focus on STEM. STEM is an acronym that stands for “Science Technology Engineering Mathematics”. It is an educational initiative to try to encourage students to enter science and math related fields. The goals of these projects are to involve kids and spark their interest in learning. Healthy Urban Food System Model was developed by Rochester Roots to help guide their curriculum for the students [2].
Rochester Roots has been given a classroom at the Freddie Thomas Montessori School. A garden will be implemented at the school and an old high school science lab is available for use. One of the many things they wish to do with the room is to provide an assembly system for students to make lip balm and hand salve products using ingredients from the garden. This MSD team is tasked with developing this assembly system with a large emphasis on facilitating experimentation for the students. The system should create a learning environment while producing usable product for RR to sell. [2]
Detailed Project Description:
Rochester Roots (RR) is committed to the creation of urban school and community-based agriculture educational programs for youth and adults. These programs focus on growing, preparing and marketing high quality, safe and affordable, healthy food that improves community wellbeing, sustainability and resiliency of it youth, community and food.
Rochester Roots partners with the Rochester City School District, community members, universities and experts to provide project-based experiential learning programs for Pre-K —8th grade students and their teachers. These programs are carried out on a functional 0.5 acre urban farm where students are immersed in the dynamics of the natural environment and are presented with various forms of an integrative learning challenge: Solving the “wicked” problems of sustainability for living systems in the 21st century. Through this process, students reinforce academic mastery and apply interdisciplinary knowledge and personal experiences to learn decision making skills that involve assessing and balancing multiple real-world criteria. In this process of learning from and with the natural environment, participants develop and implement holistic solutions to support plant-centered and human systems becoming more resilient and adaptive. The overarching theme and challenge of RR programs is to implement a new Healthy Urban Food System Model (HUFSM), which provides a practical and broad representation of interrelated systems — food education, food processing, food distribution and food production. Using the food system as the learning context allows students to make natural connections to all parts of their academic study, including the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and STEM/STEAM learning which emphasizes real world links to career and college readiness.
To meet this organizational mission, in the fall of 2011 Rochester Roots and RCSD’s Clara Barton School No. 2 applied and were selected as the first urban elementary school in New York State to be awarded a three-year high tunnel research project by Cornell University’s Horticulture Department. The high tunnel and 0.5 acre farm are also used as an outdoor classroom to reinforce learning goals through hands on experience.
The role of this DPL project team will be to work with RR, teachers at Clara Barton and students to identify experiential learning opportunities (for example, experiments , design contests, or agricultural transformation activities) that will complement their work in the classroom and garden. Each DPL team member will then develop a Project Readiness Proposal for a Multidisciplinary Senior Design team to develop the equipment necessary and experimental procedure or activity outline to satisfy identified learning goals while providing an engaging activity for the students. A current MSD team is working with RR on making adaptations to the high tunnel.
Some further info on RR educational goals follow:
RR programs provide four primary wellbeing outcomes:
· Experiential education
· Academic achievement
· Social relationship building, and
· Decision-making for wellbeing
RR offers five life-long learning inquiry perspectives:
· Life Cycles -- Seeds, soil, preservation, distribution
· Food Chain -- Compost, efficiencies recycling
· Food Processing -- Cooking, preservation, product development
· Career Development -- Exposure to 57 career and college pathways
· Brain Development -- Development of Serious Games for Health & Change
RR supports STEM learning and include the following programs:
· Greenhouse -- Indoor growing used to bring nature into the classroom.
· Raised Beds -- Gardening in a soil-filled container above ground.
· Garden-Based Education -- Utilizes the urban farm and greenhouse as a teaching tool to complement academic classroom study.
· High Tunnel Research Project -- Year round outdoor classroom that engages 60 7th-8th grade students in a research project with Cornell University and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).
· Professional Development -- Workshops that provide teachers with the knowledge and skills necessary to design, develop and maintain schoolyard gardens that support the CCSS.
· Urban Farm Share CSA & Entrepreneur Interns -- Job training program exposes students to agriculture careers through a school-based farm market that supplies nutritious vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers to community members during the growing season.
· Product Development --Students' research, design and process plant material into a product that is sold to the public.
· Cooking Classes -- Youth harvest, store and cook nutritious and delicious, farm fresh produce.
Programs Presently in Development:
· Curriculum Development/Extended Learning
· Summer Social Studies Enrichment
· Entrepreneur Apprentices
· Neighborhood Entrepreneurs
· Community Learning Center & Learning Environment
· Three Acre Agriculture, and
· Serious Games for Health and Change
Rochester Roots currently creates lip balms and hand salves to sell at local markets. They make these products using ingredients grown in their garden located at a Rochester City School (Clara Barton School). The students are involved in the harvesting process and label/package design. The products are currently made behind the scenes by Jan McDonald by heating and stirring the ingredients in a crockpot and hand pouring the product into containers. The goal of this project is to get the students involved in every step of the process. This may or may not include the following activities: creating the infused oil from the harvested plants, filtering the oil, adding ingredients, heating ingredients, stirring ingredients, pouring ingredients, cooling containers, and adding the lids and labels to the containers.
· Customer Needs and Objectives:
ME1 & ME2:
o Skills: CAD, Machining, and component selection or design for mixing and bottling steps
o Tasks:
§ Physical structure of the system
§ Machine most parts needed for the system
§ Holding and locating bottles in the system
§ Aid in design of system
ME3:
o Skills: Heat transfer to the ingredients and moving the ingredients through the system.
o Tasks:
§ Creating heating element of system
§ Fluid flow aspects of the dispensing system
§ Create system to draw fluid from the crockpot to the dispenser
§ Aid in design of system
ME4:
o Skills: Controls, circuit design, signal processing, power systems
o Tasks:
§ Create Circuit (Arduino)
· Analyzes feedback
· Accepts user input
§ Create user interface
§ Select sensors for temperature, etc.
§ Aid in design of system
ISE1
o Skills: Ergonomics, Material Science, Project management, Production systems design
o Tasks:
§ Help choose materials appropriate for each function
§ Interface heating to dispensing
§ Optimize system
§ Make student friendly (ergonomic for its users)
· Constraints: Must be appropriate for use in a school classroom
Stay within budget - budget TBD from customer
· Project Deliverables:
This project should result in a system that creates usable hand salves and lip balms.
o Working prototype for the customer by the end of MSD 2.
o User manual
o Compete design drawings
o Bill of Materials
o Assembly manual
o Test plan and results
o Poster
o Technical Paper
o Final presentation
· Budget Estimate:
· Intellectual Property (IP) considerations: No concerns known at this time
· Other Information: Discuss with Jan, guide, and other stakeholders if there are any liability issue when the end deliverable will be used by children or when surveying children to test prototypes, etc. (if needed). Rochester Roots should sign a release of liability.
· Continuation Project Information, if appropriate: Research the technique used now by Rochester Roots to make the lip balm and hand salve products. This project is an improvement on that process to allow more involvement from students.
· Tasks To Complete in the First 3 Weeks:
o All:
§ Assign Team Roles (1hr)
§ Meet with Stakeholders (1-4hrs)
· Jan McDonald
o Learn about the healthy urban food system model
o Learn what RR is all about
o Will Jan supply materials for prototype testing?
o What is the recipe for the lip balm/hand salve products?
o If the ingredients change, will it include solids (things that will not be melted)?
o How does Jan clean her crockpot?
· Montessori Principal
o Find out the allotted footprint used for assembly line
o Find out how long a cycle needs to be
· Teachers/Students
o This will give you a better understanding of what they find interesting and what they would like to get out of the setup.
§ Assign Research/Benchmarking tasks (1hr)
· To avoid overlapping research
· Topics
o Has this been done before?
o How do crockpots work? What temperatures are they at?
o How does Jan do it now?
o How do automated dispensers work now? What is their cost, how are they cleaned, can they be turned on and off or should they be ran constantly?
§ Go through the current process to make the product for better understanding (1-2hrs)
§ Draft Customer Requirements (2-3 hrs)
§ Draft Engineering Requirements (2-3 hrs)
§ Draft Functional Decomposition (1-2 hrs)
o Each Member:
§ EDGE Tutorial (1hr)
· If you do not understand how it is works, meet with guide ASAP!
§ Read and Understand PRP (2-3 hrs)
· Bring questions to next meeting
§ Schedule meeting w/ Customer (1hr work/ ~1 week turnover)
· Jan McDonald
o Go over preliminary requirements
o Address any questions, and make changes needed
§ Conduct Research and Benchmarking (2 hrs)
· Decide if further research into particular topic is needed.
Student Staffing:
· Skills Checklist: See attached checklist in Appendix.
· Anticipated Staffing Levels by Discipline:
Discipline / How Many? / Anticipated Skills Needed (concise descriptions)EE / N/A / N/A
ME / 3 / Machining, CAD, Fluids, Heat Transfer, Manufacturing
CE / N/A / N/A
ISE / 1 / Materials Processing, Production systems design, DOE, Project Management, Ergonomics
Other / N/A / N/A
Other Resources Anticipated:
Category / Description / Resource Available?Faculty
Environment / Machine shop
Montessori Classroom
Place to test things that use heat
Equipment
Materials / Lip balm/hand salve ingredients
Other / DPL EDGE website
Prepared by: / Samantha Huselstein / Date: / 5/13/14
Appendix:
References:
[1] http://www.rochesterroots.org/
[2] Jan McDonald - Director of Rochester Roots
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