Eagle’s Wings Design Project

This project was a group design and build project assigned during our first semester of CAD. The prompt called for an object that had to be 90% 3D printed and could be used by a teacher to

demonstrate a chosen mechanical principle to a class. I served as the team leader for a group of 24 people. My group chose to show an example of gears and four-bar linkages in action. We designed a mechanical representation of a bird’s wings in flight. The machine was operated by turning a crank which rotated two gears, each connected to a four-bar system (the wings) that “flapped” as the crank turned. Our team designed, printed, and assembled a functioning prototype, and compiled an extensive report including manufacture and operation instructions.

The main difficulty faced in this project was the terribly poor team member participation. As the class was mainly freshman students, many were not truly dedicated to earning engineering degrees. Only about half our group actually completed the class, and a clear majority of the project work was done by a small handful of people. After it became apparent that we would have much less participation than expected, I responded by reevaluating our design, restructuring team organization, and ramping up communication so that the team members we did have were able to work as efficiently as possible. As team leader, I felt personally responsible for the success of our team’s project and take pride in the completed result (I keep it sitting on top of my bookcase).

While this project involved detailed design work and served as a great introduction to 3D printing, my biggest take-aways were the leadership skills attained. I gained an ability to communicate with people in an objective manner - to convey ideas and thoughts clearly enough that they can be fully understood and expanded upon, while keeping the conversation directed towards a goal. In particular, I had to learn how to tell people they had not done something right and needed to redo it, as opposed to just doing it correctly myself. Furthermore, I learned how to manage the workload of everyone involved so that no subgroup was left scrambling to complete something after having to wait on a different subgroup. The leadership role was an exciting challenge and inspired me to take the role of team leader whenever possible for subsequent group projects.