This week, I brainstormed a few different ideas for final projects. I focused mainly on thinking up project ideas that would make my life easier or could be tangentially related to my research in ESOL and adult basic education.

The first idea I came up with was a pop-up book scanner, which would be really useful to me since I’ve been working with children’s books in my research and would love a way to automate the scanning in of large, picture-heavy pages.

There are some in existence, such as the one below. I’m curious how I can design one to make it extremly low cost and easy to setup.

[Source: http://diybookscanner.org/ ]

The second idea I came up with was inspired by a project I did in undergrad, where I made a water fountain that danced to music (more about this project here). I really enjoyed working with water, since it forced us to be better mechanical designers (so that we didn’t destroy our parts).

At home, our basil plant is always in a state of “almost-dying”, so I want to make a basil plant hydration system that allows me to water our plant with a click of a button.