The VeinCam team (Josh, Alex, Patrick and Alex) visted Gungahlin College on 2/5/2019 for a formal presentation on ANU's Systems Engineering processes and how it related to our designing of VeinCam. We presented to the Year 10 SMART Program and a mixture of the Year 11 and 12 Mechatronics cohort.
Being secondary school students at 3:30pm, the energy of the students was rather low but they didn't stop most of the class from actively engaging in the design activity. There were little questions from the audience regarding the specifics of VeinCam, but a snap poll by show of hands revealed that most of the class would take VeinCam or a similar project on as their Year 12 major Mechatronics program. This informed us that the use secondary school students have for VeinCam is rather restricted, given they create projects similar to VeinCam at this level of education. The major asset to VeinCam, according to Mechatronics teacher Nick West, is that it is open source and can allow students to take advantage of the school's facilities and recreate the project themselves, thus giving the students a great introduction to how to use the tools, machines and design programs.
Nicola Kovacs, the Year 10 SMART program co-ordinator, saw massive potential in how VeinCam introduced students to the Systems Design Process, and get students thinking about iterative designs and having a proper scope prior to developing hardware.
Special thanks to Nicola and Nick for organising this presentation.