Rachel Barnes Engineering Portfolio
Scavenge Around Saturn
Challenge Description:
Each tribe is tasked to explore the galaxy (campus). You will do so by completing different tasks to collect puzzle pieces, but there is a twist! There are 6 puzzle pieces needed to complete the puzzle, but 12 different tasks! Each piece corresponds to two tasks that are connected through a common theme. For example: if a category is “located on BU’s campus” then every task that is located in on BU’s campus will reward tribe members with puzzle piece #3. The tricky part is, we do not reveal what these categories are. It is up to each tribe to try and figure out what the categories are in order to retrieve the puzzle pieces faster, or you can just try and go off luck!
In addition, each task will have a certain number of players that must complete it! This makes strategizing and communication very important.
Once all 6 pieces are found, two members from each tribe will try to solve the puzzle. First two tribes to solve the puzzle win immunity!
Survivor Northeastern Season 15 Episode 1:
There is an editing team led by TC Stephens which is working on creating episodes of the latest season. This challenge is featured in Episode 1 which can be found using the link below!
Skills Learned:
3D Printing, Product Design, DFA
Puzzle Base
For the puzzle aspect of the challenge, the Challenge Design Committee had decided on a word puzzle. We developed a few constraints: high level of difficulty, has to be completed outside, must only be 6 pieces. With these constraints in mind, I developed a word puzzle with 6 pieces with 4-6 letters on each side. Before fabricating the pieces, I decided to fabricate the base in order to ensure the pieces would fit smoothly within the base. The base has slots for 6 puzzle pieces to freely rotate and all allign to spell out a phrase.
Puzzle Peices
Once the base was fabricated, I designed the puzzle pieces. I first printed out one set in small form to test the difficulty level. I found that the puzzle was too simple if they only had letters on one side, but too difficult if they had letters on all three sides. Therefore, I designed 1 piece to have 1 side, 2 to have 2, and 3 to have 3. Below is an example of a 2-sided piece.
Full Puzzle
Once the difficulty of the puzzle was selected, the next task was to ensure that the puzzle pieces easily fit within the base. They needed to rotate smoothly yet also remain snug in the base. The base had deep slots so that the pieces could rotate in the x-y axis yet would not fall out of the base in the z-axis. After it was ensured, these constraints were met, I mass printed the remaining 30 pieces and 2 bases needed to execute the challenge. See the image below for the solution of the puzzle.
