In spite of all the work going on during the weeks, milestones are important moments in the CHIC process. They are a way to demonstrate the progress towards the development of the prototype. At the same time they require students to present in 15 minutes (followed by 10 minutes of Q&A) the business, design and engineering perspectives of the project – packing this into such a short amount of time does require both flawless presentation skills and a good amount of thought as to the key aspects to communicate. All the teams did well on the timing – there remains a margin of improvement when it comes to the key aspects. Last but not least, milestones bring together all the participants and most supervisors providing extremely valuable feedback in addition to the one provided between the milestones. We also had the “surprise” visit of some CHIC alumni, another good sign of CHIC’s dynamic community.
As a recap, the four teams are working on:
- A scheduling device for children suffering from ASD (Learning with Disabilities)
- A sensor helping NGOs manage their water hand pumps (Humanitarian Relief)
- A wearable to measure UV exposure (Smart Wellness)
- An odorless compost device (Food Waste)
Half of the teams already had a live demo covering some engineering aspect – not a small feast since the components had arrived at the beginning of the week…
The milestone was also the occasion to introduce some new tools including a questionnaire on interdisciplinary project management developed with Roland Tormey from EPFL’s CAPE and a shared feedback document accessible to the supervisors and core CHIC team.
Week 6 starts Monday… and the second milestone is scheduled for April 28 (12.00-14.30, BC 02).
In the meantime you can follow the weekly progress on the blog, on the projects’ page and/or subscribe to the CHIC twitter feed.
See you at the end of April!