Origin: 2.00B Toy Product Design
Task: This course is an introduction to the product design process with a focus on designing for play and entertainment. In this course, students work in small teams of 5-6 members to design and prototype new toys.
Approach:
We first thought about a UFO idea, where the Frisbee can look like a UFO with a LED attached to it. While the UFO is flying, the bubbles will be produced from the top of the UFO. We developed two different approaches to make a Frisbee blow bubbles, one with a motor and one without. We realized that the Frisbee with a motor and batteries will add on too much weight, so we decided to produce bubbles without a motor. Testing with different sizes and positions of holes helped us find out that bubbles are easier to produce when the bubble wands are on the top of the Frisbee. However, bubbles are hard to produce if we only drill holes on the Frisbee, it needs some teeth to store a little bit of solution in order to produce bubbles. In our initial prototype, we combined several small wands together to make a circular wand. We also started thinking about how to make this into a fun game, and after play testing in the Children's Museum in Boston, we realized that children are always entertained by bubbles no matter what, so we designed a stand for the bubble solution. For our final prototype, we used SolidWorks to 3D print our bubble wands, and we made our own models using thermoforming for the stand and the Frisbee.
Design Feature:
A frisbee that produces bubbles in the air.
Players dunk the frisbee in bubble solution on the playing field. When thrown, bubbles are produced out of the top of the Frisbee.
Players dunk the frisbee in bubble solution on the playing field. When thrown, bubbles are produced out of the top of the Frisbee.