Summary

Eli Krieger and Anna Kraft

 Every day in cities children walk around not knowing what it just outside of their view, that if they were to just look up at night and there were no lights in the sky all they would see is stars. Our solution is a room that children walk into and when they turn the crank lights turn on creating a mini planetarium for them to look at, including constellations, stars, planets, and a space ship.

 

Our first iteration was not base on the idea of a planetarium, instead, it was meant as a room for children to discover the hidden world of shadow effects. The project was to be a black box with show boxes inside that light up and turn as the child turns a knob in front of him/her. After getting feedback from our coaches and looking at the project description again we decided that discovering the world of shadows and simply having the child turn a knob was not enough. For the iteration after this, we made some major changes that ended up being our final design.

From that idea, we decided to keep the black box and an interactive knob idea. The knob would now be a crank for the child to turn, and the box would be larger to accommodate the child. For the second iteration, we decided to project stars, planets, and other outer space things onto the wall. we also had the idea of having each of the different levels spin at different speeds. This change causes the shadow effects on the wall to be different for the entire time the child is in the room. If they were all at the same speed the shadows would repeat every time the discs made a full revolution. Another thing that was added in was the crank, this allowed the child to have an outcome on the experience. For every 5 seconds that the child turned the crank a new set o lights would turn on showing different shadows. Then if the child were to stop cranking the lights would turn off in the same order.