Possible/ Final Solutions Reflection

I am very happy with the door locking mechanism that I have designed for this project. I think my possible solutions were great for cementing in my mind what was important to consider in the final design, these considerations included:

1. Must not jam
2. Must be discreet
3. Must be as secure as it can be to keep the elderly person and their belongings safe
4. Must include a key so that the elderly person does not have to adapt as much from their habits developed over their entire lives.

I think that this design could be very successful and could be integrated into today's doors quite easily.

Research/ Investigation Reflection

For the past few days we have been researching as a group using the class diigo folder and the class wiki. What we have done is:

1. First search for useful content about locking mechanisms, elderly and other relevant information for our project on the internet.
2. When we found a relevant website we bookmarked it on diigo and placed it into the class folder so that the rest of the class could see the useful websites that I found and so that I could see what they'd found - Class Social Bookmarking Repository
3. We then wrote about our findings on the "research" wiki page. Class Research Wiki
4. If we had something to add to someone else's points we could do that and we could also correct any mistakes that we discovered while reading other pupils' work

I think we worked really well as a team again during this activity. Everyone was willing to add their information to the wiki and no one got annoyed when someone made changes to their work.

Our research has definitely given me lots of ideas about what my lock design will look like and I am looking forward to sketching my possible solutions and posting them up here on my blog for my friends to look at and tell me what they think of them.

Analysis of Brief Reflection

We have analysed the brief as a class on our wiki page, Analysis of Brief Wiki. From this analysis we decided that the project that is most viable and useful to older people is to design and model a mechanism for unlocking doors. The reason we have decided this is because many of pupils' grandparents have difficulty when trying to open their front doors and we would like to help them.

I am very happy with our choice because I have lots of ideas about how to make opening doors easier for elderly people.

I think we worked well as a group in analysing the brief and identifying a problem that elderly people have. I think my idea to ask the rest of the class to leave a comment to tell the group which idea we should go with was good because everyone contributed and it led to a democratic decision and after some discussion in the halls at break time most pupils are happy with the decision.