Automated Boomwhacker System

For our senior design project, our group was charged with the task of building an automated musical instrument that would play at least three distinct tunes in order to teach K-12 children valuable mechanical engineering principles. Music is a great tool for educators, parents/guardians, or any child caregiver to use that allows kids of all ages to remain engaged in learning activities and express their creative side at the same time. In order to promote the use of music as a tool for learning, we created an automated boomwhacker system that plays a variety of popular songs built primarily for classroom use to engage kids in learning about the mechanics behind sound and how it can be formed.
Overall, our design process consisted of three major phases: Task Clarification, Conceptual Design, and Embodiment/Detailed Design. In the first phase, we conducted research on customer requirements and organized these needs by using the customer needs list and House of Quality. We also set up our GANTT chart and task list that would help keep us on track throughout the semester. Finally, we created a problem statement that outlined what we would need to achieve in our next phase of conceptual design. Here, we executed a lot of brainstorming techniques such as concept generation and the morph matrix which narrowed down our goals for each of our chosen functions. We were then able to build a low-resolution prototype that allowed us to transition into our final phase of design/concept embodiment. Our last phase involved a lot of experimentation, iteration, and trial/error to find what worked best for our design. We finally were able to produce a final design that met all of our requirements, from customer needs to assigned tasks.
Our final design has many strong points, such as the ability to engage children/teach them engineering concepts, the user interface, and the aesthetics. We built our boomwhacker system to be quite large and colorful in order for children in a classroom to easily see and interact with how it works. The rainbow colors of the boomwhackers and their large size intrigues children and keeps them wanting to watch it work rather than be distracted by something else. The bright rainbow colors paired with the sleek clear acrylic structure also makes our product aesthetically pleasing to look at. In addition to this, we are proud of the screen functionality on the electronics box and how it provides a great user interface to the customer. Our screen comes with a button that both educators and students can easily use to control the system on their own; the screen then displays a menu with song choices and tells the user when a song is playing (this could be especially great for those who are hard of hearing, as they can be engaged with touch and sight in addition to sound). One of our biggest objectives was building a device that was engaging to our audience, and we believe our design exceeds this objective.