For my senior Capstone Project, I wanted to help the thousands of homeless people in the city of philadelphia. I had first wanted to make a bed out of something recyclable, so I had chose car tires. I had then pitched my idea to Braskem and got tons of support from the company and from family and friends, but it was a short lived dream because it was not possible to get the tires professionally cut the way that I needed. So now onto a new idea I had thought of making something lightweight and affordable so I had chose a bed made out of PVC. I had lots of trouble with getting the bed to sustain weight and also support itself and also a person. After multiple design changes and testing I had come up with a final design that met all the goals that I needed. I plan to donate my bed to a homeless shelter because there are hundreds of homeless people turned away from shelters because of lack of beds. My bed would provide another resting place, but also the ability to pack it up and make it easy for storage.

theTimberFrameGuy. “DIY Suspension Bridge - 54’ Span.” YouTube, YouTube, 7 Aug. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYOC_3H27Yg.

“How Is the Body Affected by Sleep Deprivation?” Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/sleep/conditioninfo/sleep-deprivation.

Boone, Rebecca. “Court: Cities Can’t Prosecute People for Sleeping on Streets.” The Seattle Times, The Seattle Times Company, 4 Sept. 2018, www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/court-criminalizing-homeless-for-sleeping-outdoo rs-is-cruel/

“From My Experience, Here Is How Homeless People Live.” Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, 9 Dec. 2016, www.neoch.org/chronicle-232-articles/2016/12/9/from-my-experience-here-is-how-homeless-pe ople-live.html

Zone, Top 10. “Top 10 Best Portable Camping Bed & Cot Innovations.” YouTube, YouTube, 24 Mar. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXwVnIEAbuY

“Know Homelessness.” Office of Homeless Services, philadelphiaofficeofhomelessservices.org/know-homelessness/

“Best Temperature for Sleep.” Sleep.Org, Sleep.Org, www.sleep.org/articles/temperature-for-sleep/

Lord, Elliot. “Making Card Beds for Homeless People.” YouTube, YouTube, 3 Sept. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=_N5L6TDLCQA

“10 Benefits of a Memory Foam Mattress.” Amerisleep Blog, 26 Sept. 2018, www.amerisleep.com/blog/10-benefits-foam-memory-mattress/.

“The Amazing Benefits of Sleeping in a Hammock.” Mattress and Sleep Product Reviews, www.thesleepjudge.com/benefits-sleeping-hammock/.

Growing up in the public school system, I noticed that studies became very compartmentalized and creative applications were specifically reserved for students in outside programs or who were pursuing a career entailing those applications. This continues to cause many students who are unaccustomed with creative expression to believe that they are not inherently creative and therefore cannot be creative, simply due to a lack of opportunity. My intention for my capstone was to refresh students with creative applications of building to increase confidence in student’s ideas and push them to think outside the box through fun building challenges. I created an initial survey to understand student’s notions about creativity and leadership. I then advertised for a club meeting by creating posters and hanging them in the school. I created a series of three prompts where teams of approximately 5 students had to work under time constraints and with limited household materials to build a tower, weight-bearing bridge, and ball transport system. The activities were designed to be fun and low stress, but engaged participants with their competitive side. I learned about the challenges of taking a coaching role versus my typical teammate role in encouraging and offering constructive but elusive feedback. I was able to improve my own creative skills by brainstorming possible solutions to decide appropriate materials for them to use. Each of these challenges pushed the participants to question traditional methods and instead search for loopholes.

Bibliography

Barras, Colin. “Future - Can You Learn to Be Creative?” BBC News. March 14, 2014. Accessed January 30, 2019. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140314-learn-to-be-creative. This article analyses studies on teaching and learning creativity and takes the stance that creativity should be salvaged through teaching. Levels of creativity are being crushed in school age children due to to the increase of importance of standardized test scores and creativity is currently only being truly taught at a university level when it may be too late. This article explores nontraditional methods and courses that foster creativity as its importance re-emerges in the workforce. I will use these findings as a driving force in my own work to re-integrate creativity into the minds of young people.

Creative Competitions. Scoring for Spontaneous. PDF. Glassboro: Creative Competitions, Inc., 2010. This score sheet offers two categories: Creativity and Teamwork. The creativity score sheet specifies how to be elusive when stating the problem so one solution is not encouraged by the language of the problem. Although I will not be using numerical values to assess my club’s solutions, I can assess their creativity on this scale to offer feedback. The teamwork score sheet describes a range of optimal cooperation and collaboration to team domination and dissonance. This document will help me encourage good team dynamics and help me recognize issues within the group.

Destination Imagination. Four Free Instant Challenges. PDF. Cherry Hill: Destination Imagination, Inc., 2014. This source is intended for teams to use in preparation for the “instant challenge” portion of the competition. It offers four prompts, two of which are Hands-On and include materials, setup, and possible scoring. I will use these prompts as a basis for my own and especially the materials and setup to acquire their counterparts for my own original problems. These example problems spark my ability as they demonstrate extensions of very basic prompts, such as requiring that an otherwise basic tower must touch four separate taped off sections of floor. These give me a basis of steps I can take to make my own work more complex.

DiscoverDesign Staff. “Design Process.” DiscoverDesign. 2018. Accessed February 04, 2019. https://www.discoverdesign.org/handbook. This article explains the six steps of the engineering design process. It offers a short description of each step and basic applications. I will use this process to design the optimal solutions to my prompts. The most important part that is not included in Odyssey of the Mind style prompts is the final two steps of Feedback and Improve. This process will serve as a reminder to integrate those steps as they are important to SLA’s core values and curriculum and their integration will help students apply their skills.

Kouzes, James M., and Barry Z. Posner. The Leadership Challenge. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987. This source is a book demonstrating the five practices of leadership, those being Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart. The first chapter of this book focuses on two interviews that demonstrate struggles to lead and tactics that helped manage a group, one being Lindsay Levin of White’s Vehicle Repair and Ted Turner of Turner Broadcasting System. Levin’s exemplary leadership is characterized by gaining small successes as a team to build trust in the team, committing to teaching strategies to members, and recognizing success through awards. She also speaks of a technique of “zapping vs sapping,” where the leader boosts a member’s motivation by recognizing good work. Turner had success with leadership by encouraging risk-taking creativity and creating a company store to increase exclusivity and pride. While my project will be less run like a company and not commercial product driven, I will use these techniques on a small scale in running a club of members that must work as a team each meeting.

Llove. Hands-On Problem: The Strongest Link. PDF. Virginia: Odyssey of the Mind, 2006. This source offers an Odyssey of the Mind-style, hands-on, spontaneous problem involving two parts. They entails creating a chain on which a cup full of weights are held. This problem demonstrates the difficulty factor of having one time period to build and a second to alter or challenge the structure. I will use this problem as a basis to create two part problems where added complexities challenge teams after their initial build to extend their creativity. I can also use the model of a bridge-like problem as the underlying build challenge.

Mandel, Brett. “Coaching Spontaneous.” Interview by author. February 2019. The interviewee is my Odyssey of the Mind coach. He was a participant of the program in his youth and has been coaching Odyssey of the Mind for about a decade. I will use this interview to understand his experience coaching students who are high school aged in a problem solving context. I will ask questions about how to give constructive feedback during short creativity prompts and how to make sure students are listening to each other’s ideas. He will also have good ideas about where to get materials for hands-on problems.

Micklus, C. S., and Samuel W. Micklus. Lots of Problems, Many Solutions. Sewell, NJ: Creative Competitions, 2007. This book serves as an introduction to the Odyssey of the Mind program and offers many official verbal and hands-on spontaneous prompts. The introduction gives an overview of creative problem solving, and I will use these concepts to understand the basis and apply it to my club. I will use later chapters to base my original problems off of. The most useful piece of information this book offers is a detailed site setup, which is very important to solving the prompt.

Nelson, Robert. “Why It Is (Almost) Impossible to Teach Creativity.” The Conversation. January 09, 2019. Accessed January 31, 2019. http://theconversation.com/why-it-is-almost-impossible-to-teach-creativity-105659. This article from an independent not-for-profit organization presents a controversial and cynical view on creativity to a wide and unspecified audience. It presents problem solving as a lesser application of creativity as problems serve as an anxious place. I will use this view to dispute the stressful or limited applications of creativity through making my problems have more than just one feasible solution. I will offer opportunity for creative growth by rewarding risk-taking even if a solution fails. This club is meant to become a space for students to exercise creativity, not to place a stressor on specific solutions.

Perkins, T., J. Otte, and S. Riggs. The “Unofficial” On-line Coaches’ Training. PPT. Glassboro: Odyssey of the Mind, 2013. This presentation begins to prep outsiders on how to coach teams specifically for the Odyssey of the Mind competition and season. It covers the principle of divergent vs convergent problem solving and promotes the concept that divergent problem solving allows students to take creative measures and calculated risks in their solution. The source also states the responsibility of the coach to lead by asking questions. I will use this technique when coaching my club,asking constructive questions to allow students to work among themselves without the guidance of concrete answers that would lead them un-creatively to the solution. The presentation also places an emphasis on only allowing constructive criticism between teammates, which is another sentiment I will utilize.

    Like many other medical conditions, chronic migraines and headaches occur in about two to three million people in the United States, one of them being my mother. 
For my capstone, I decided that my overall goal was to create a portable massaging tool that helps with headaches and/or migraines. This gave me the chance to take my passions of both physical therapy and computer science and apply it to something useful. With the help of many research papers, I decided to focus on the four pressure points: two on the neck, and two on the forehead, to help release the pain, by decreasing the intensity of the headache.
The most important part of this project was getting familiar with coding. This was the first code that I had to build and structure myself, and it was difficult. Just figuring out the first code for finding frequency took about four weeks, as I was trying to gain knowledge of coding through Arduino references sheets and different libraries. At one point, I got stuck on one part of the code for several days. Then, I had to make another code for the actual vibration using the Circuit Playground Express and a Haptic Motor Driver, as the power of the headband. The vibration motors were connected to the power, all soldered. After that, I placed the circuit onto a plastic material, that was easy to slide throughout the newly made headband (with zipper for easy access to the circuit and controls). 

Abraham, Nikhil. CODING FOR KIDS FOR DUMMIES. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2015. http://file.allitebooks.com/20150627/Coding%20For%20Dummies.pdf. This source provides the full language of code, understanding, and writing it. This information can easily be used to gain early knowledge on what exactly it is, and getting started on learning one of the languages. In skimming through, the beginning instructs the learner to always follow instructions and make sure it is fun for him/her, for it’s easier to learn when one is fully engaged and eager to learn about something he/she cares about.

Baumhardt, Carol, LMT. “Migraine and Tension Headaches: Using Massage to Ease the Pain.” Nationwide Children’s. December 19, 2017. Accessed January 24, 2019. https://www.nationwidechildrens.org/family-resources-education/700childrens/2017/12/migraine-and-tension-headaches-using-massage-to-ease-the-pain. This source provides early information about the differences between a migraine and a headache, explained by a professional, hinting on what needs to happen to treat them both. The author comments the initial signs of each and goes into deep detail with symptoms and even giving statistics on each about how many people suffer from both, or even confuse the two. It stresses the importance of knowing and telling a doctor of some sort, so help can be provided. In fact, the article does hint the readers about the success massages have had on people, especially migraine sufferers and children.

Chaibi, Aleksander, Tuchin, Peter J., and Russell, Michael Bjørn. “Manual Therapies for Migraine: A Systematic Review.” PMC, February 05, 2011. Accessed January 24, 2019. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3072494/#CR9. This source is a series of journal entries that shows multiple experiments of massage therapy being utilized on people with any type of head pain: migraines or just regular headaches. The difference between this one and the previous, is that this one was done in both the United States and New Zealand, both having the frequencies of the head pain being reduced between 31% and 71%. Along with these conclusions, the numbers can be used for programming and calculating the intensity of the massage tool, how fast it vibrates, and it would be simpler understand the effects of the tool, even with not enough testers to use the tool.

Downward, Emily. “Massages for Migraine Relief.” Migraine.com. May 2018. Accessed January 24, 2019. https://migraine.com/complimentary-and-alternative-therapies/massage/. This source provides the general information needed on massage therapy and its use to those who suffer from migraines. It also goes deeper into the fact that it is possible to have a self-massage for migraines, describing the different types of massages and what is useful for those with frequent migraines. In addition, it provides warnings as to who can/cannot use this therapy, for their health, which helps conclude that there needs to be a safer way to give the therapeutic massages. The writer of the article is not a doctor herself, but professional doctors, therapists, and college students are referenced throughout the article to prove the discoveries.

Flow - Wellness and Training. Youtube. April 11, 2017. Accessed January 24, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=SkyE24PmWgQ. This source is from a legitimate company that performs migraine massage therapy in Greece, known for their ideals and unique but successful approach to treatment and diseases. The video is showing a migraine massage being done on a patient, explaining each of their movements, along with the muscles being used and what they do to participate in the intensity of migraines. It also shows several different massages being done, all including the face and the neck. This describes the process in which needed to understand how much pressure and vibration goes into each movement and spot in which they used.

Glaser, Angie. “8 Pressure Points for Headaches You Should Know About.” Migraine Again. April 08, 2017. Accessed January 24, 2019. https://migraineagain.com/pressure-points-for-headaches-and-nausea/. This source provides information on acupressure for people who would like to self-massage, which is used mostly when a person suddenly has a terrible migraine or headache. It demonstrates with pictures showing the exact spots that ease the intensity in migraines and headaches. This could eventually be used in the instruction manual, explaining the use and safety measures of the tool. It also links to video interviews of real people with migraines and how they feel after doing therapy and using these pressure points. This can conclude the popular spot in which works the best for patients, which equal overall happiness.

Golden, Katie M. “Tackling Migraines Head-On | Massage Therapy Journal.” Amtamassage. May 23, 2017. Accessed January 24, 2019. https://www.amtamassage.org/articles/3/MTJ/detail/3704/tackling-migraines-head-on. This source is actually a journal explaining the steps in which migraines normally progress, described in phases. With a total of four phases, it tells the period in which they last, what it feels like, and the effects of each step. It also goes into depth about people with chronic tension type migraines, and how massage therapy is the best home remedy and the most effective. Along with this, it goes into more statistics about specific cases of people with chronic migraines and their lives with and without the massages.

Khan, Salman. “Planning a Programming Project.” Khan Academy. Accessed January 24, 2019. https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming/programming/good-pr actices/a/planning-a-programming-project. This source gives a detailed step by step process on how to approach a coding project for beginners, seeing that beginners would need more guidance than experienced engineers would. In reading through the whole article, it was clear that the first step is to understand and determine the goals of the project, then more on to the materials and the experience one will need to be able to complete it. At the same time, it also encourages that one shouldn’t get easily frustrated and if there is a problem, to just look it up and see if anyone else has done anything like it. It also suggests to make a timeline for what needs to be done.

Kirby, Kristin J. “Is Massage Effective As A Non-Pharmacologic Treatment For Individuals Suffering From Migraines?” (2012). Student diss. Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. Accessed January 24, 2019. https://digitalcommons.pcom.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1084&context=pa_systematic_reviews. This source is a college science paper, proving that massage therapy does indeed make a difference on patients that suffer from migraines, or even just occurring headaches. There are a total of three different studies, two of them involving deep tissue massages either once or twice a week for five weeks. The patient’s outcomes before, during, and after the massage, their migraine headache frequency, and their sleep quality was recorded everyday during the five weeks, which is shown within the source. These numbers can definitely be utilized in the making of the project.

“Top 10 Best Handheld Deep Tissue Electric Massagers in 2018.” GGP. 2018. Accessed January 24, 2019. https://garagegymplanner.com/best-electric-massagers/. This source is an article from a health company that tries to encourage people to be healthy at home and suggest ways in which they can do so, without it being difficult. It evaluates the best electric massagers describing their techniques, and also other ratings that real people who have actually used the product have said about it. With judging their vibration intensity, duration, and overall appearance, it also describes what it’s best used for in certain situations, talking about the motors and types of heads that is provided. This will make it easier to pick it flaws and see important components that will be needed with the project.