The Georgia Governor’s Honors Program (GHP) is a highly selective residential summer program for gifted and talented high school students nominated in a specific area of study.

During my sophomore summer, I attended GHP as an Engineering major with a concentration in Mechanical Design. This four week residential program was rich with both personal and technical growth. As 1 of 5 female sophomore engineering students, I went into the program knowing my classmates would be predominantly male juniors. What I did not expect was such a diverse range of communication styles, and learning how to communicate effectively was a unique challenge during our final project: a weeklong design and fabrication sprint.

OVERVIEW

For the Engineering Project Fair, I was in a team of four as the mechanical designer of the group. Being one of the more artistically inclined teams, we chose to design, fabricate, and code an electro-mechanical kinetic art installation in collaboration with the Visual Arts majors.

^{DAY 1}

We began by having multiple brainstorming sessions on the design for our installation. As the team continued to sketch different variations of the project, we chose our top three ideas and finalized on a design inspired by the Japanese culture, nature, and art of one of my teammates (Idea 3).

^{DAYS 2-3}

After agreeing on the final layout and mockup, we immediately began building! Some parts of the installation were laser cut from acrylic and then frosted so the LED lights would diffuse more evenly. Wooden parts were cut from the bandsaw machine and neatly painted. Faced with the problem of creating delicately detailed flowers and leaves for the branch, we moved forward with using rubber flower molds and hot melt adhesive to create translucent floral shapes.

^{DAYS 4-6}

Wanting to dazzle our audience with LED lights and moving parts, we originally assigned domain specific individual tasks to meet the one week deadline. When a team member completely disengaged during the final two days approaching the Engineering Expo, we realized that the remaining group would have to figure out both the wiring and coding required to light up and move the installation. By exercising open communication, another teammate and I utilized Adafruit tutorials to learn how to program arduinos and gained instructor feedback in order to successfully complete a functional and aesthetic installation.

^{DAY 7}

The art installation incorporated laser cut parts layered inside of a 3D frame. The mechanical parts of the installation (animals) were timed to pop up during different seasons. Simultaneously, the LED lights behind the flowers and leaves on the branch changed colors with the turn of the seasons. The flowers and leaves would turn green during summer, yellow and red during autumn, blue during winter, and red and green during spring.