Self-Regulating Heater (Unit: Inventions and Inventors)

Evaluation
This is my first time using the design cycle and “inventing” something! This project was quite interesting and showed that we are capable of creating inventions that we would enjoy. Before we decided on the idea of a self-regulating heater, we had a few other awesome ideas, but thought that this would be more useful. Although our group was talkative and very social we got all our work done and cooperated well with each other. I think our idea was realistic and can be invented because it is made from parts that are already in this world, such as a heater and infrared camera. During our presentation, we discussed what our product would be like and showed the 9th grade a drawing of our self-regulated heater. The area of interaction (AOI) is human ingenuity which asks us “why and how do we create?” and “what are the consequences?”. We create because we are imaginative and are constantly thinking about how to improve things or what else we need in this world. Right now the world is full of technology, which makes us lazy because we invent things so we don’t need to do anything. Consequences of inventing include, making us lazy and give us more health problems. For example, cell phones are bad for our body because of the send radio waves, giving us brain damage. Although we think all this technology helps us, it is creating bad habits and making people use things that harm the human body. The learner profile for this project was being a risk taker and I do believe that I was a risk taker by trying to imagine and invention that I would want in my own house. Usually I don’t take risks and am afraid of believing that something of mine is actually good, so I think this helped me realize that take risks, show and discuss your ideas, and putting your thoughts on paper.
Criteria A: Investigate
While investigating what we wanted to improve in our lives, we came up with two ideas, 1) A Self-Regulating Heater, and 2) A Voice Activated Football (Soccer ball). We ended up choosing a self-regulating heater because we thought it would be cool and more people would purchase it than a voice activated soccer ball.
During our investigation we tried to find out if a self-regulating heater had been invented and what type of infrared camera should be used to find people’s body temperature. We needed to come up with a common household item that was a realistic improvement of something already invented. We decided to choose a heater and make it more advanced because we planned on making it more efficient so you do not spend money on heat you do not want.
Through our research, we found self-regulating heaters that are set to one temperature and don’t use an infrared camera to change the room temperature accordingly, so we made ours a more advanced version so that the temperature changes with your own body temperature. We chose to include an infrared camera in our heater because then you wouldn’t have to change the heater manually, it would just adjust to your body temperature to create the right room temperature. We searched what type of infrared camera we could use and found that the uncooled infrared detector would be used best for this purpose.
Throughout all our research, we did not find anything about a self-regulated heater using an infrared camera, but found information to prove that it is a realistic invention that could be used in everyday life.

Criteria B: Design
Our design is basically a regular heater but includes an infrared camera located in the middle of the original design and also has a manual way of controlling the temperature on the side. It is cost-efficient, child safe, portable, and runs on electricity. We would install an uncooled infrared camera into our heater to calculate people’s temperature, and then it would automatically adjust your own temperature accordingly. Our child safety feature includes rubber edges on any sharp corners. One of the questions that came up was “how would it change the temperature in a room of many people?”. It seems logical that the infrared camera would find the temperature of everyone and average the temperature.
Our final design is just like the regular heater, but includes an infrared camera and comes it a variety of sizes and colors. We also came up with a line called “Da Fonk”. These include designs for children, which come in bright colors and different shapes likes snails and flowers.
I believe this invention will be useful in everyday life and will cancel our all problems with manual heaters.
Criteria C: Plan
Our plan was to create a poster that showed the different features of our heaters and the “Da Fonk” line for children. We made sure we made it bright colored and easy to read, although someone crushed it and accidentally spilt water on it creating a smudge in the bottom right hand corner of our poster.
We first planned to do a rough sketch of what we wanted our poster to be like, and then neatly drew out all our designs. Next we had to label and describe our designs and their features. It was then colored and presented to the class.
Criteria D: Create
During the creating process we need to produce a series of tests to evaluate our self-regulating heater and ask ourselves questions that will help evaluate our product. While coming up with questions we were looking at our poster to figure out how we want to evaluate ourselves.
We started asking ourselves if the poster explains our self-regulating heater well, if it is colorful, if it is neat, if our final product has changed throughout the design cycle, does our poster clearly represent the idea of our product, and what could be improved.
All of these questions passed our evaluation test, although some could have been improved and things could have been neater. We asked a few people about our product and was successful in thinking that it could be a realistic improvement of a heater.