Mega Marble Maze

The Mega Marble Maze is a toy designed for children with special needs that incorporates the concepts behind marble tracks and building blocks to deliver a fun, intuitive, and creative play experience. Our team successfully evaluated, tested, and redesigned the Mega Marble Maze, using professional ASTM Engineering standards, and client feedback from Reach Services, a physical and occupational therapy clinic that serves a large part of western Indiana.

For this project, I took on the role of managing fabrication and prototyping, being responsible for each physical iteration of our design, and testing new materials for their aesthetic, and physical properties. I took this opportunity to work with 3d printers using different preparation techniques for our files, and using layer pauses to insert magnets into each piece so that they could be printed around, and held entirely captive within the printed piece. This ensured that each piece would remain structurally sound because of a cohesive, seamless exterior.

This experience served as my introduction to the rigor of engineering metrics, and how they are evaluated. I hope to continue this throughout my degree path as I venture closer to product design. Projects like this are what prepare me to manage each step in a product's lifespan, and guide it from ideation to fruition.