Every intern in the lab was tasked with a different toy/project to create and prototype throughout the summer for an exhibit at the discovery center where visitors aged 3-100 could create their own project to take home, made out of completely recycled materials. My project task was creating a hand grabber that could pick up something as small as a marble, but could be built by someone who was at least 8 years old.
I began with a lot of research: everything from looking at prosthetic hands to examining how my own hand picks something up.
From there, the prototyping process began. I built as many different types of hand grabbers as I could imagine out of recycled paper, Popsicle sticks, chopsticks, rubber bands, cardboard, straws, yarn and pins.
Once I had landed on a prototype that I thought was the most effective and closest to the final product, I took the grabber to the testing stage and tested the project in the lab with children aged 8 and above.
After the testing stage, obstacles that testing subjects faced were addressed, and the project was finalized and launched in the lab in September 2018, leading to over 3,000 units of the project being produced, one of the highest records in the lab. The hand grabber featured a radius, ulna, and thumb pad, and accomplished the final goal of picking up a marble.
