Puzzle Design Process: Midterm Portfolio Review

Problem Statement

A local office furniture manufacturing company throws away tens of thousands of scrap 3⁄4” hardwood cubes that result from its furniture construction processes. The material is expensive, and the scrap represents a sizeable loss of profit.

Design Statement
Fine Office Furniture, Inc. would like to return value to its waste product by using it as the raw material for desktop novelty items that will be sold on the showroom floor. Design, build, test, document, and present a three-dimensional puzzle system that is made from the scrap hardwood cubes. The puzzle system must provide an appropriate degree of challenge to high school students.

Criteria

1. The puzzle must be fabricated from 27 – 3⁄4′′ hardwood cubes.
   
2. Thepuzzlesystemmustcontainexactlyfivepuzzleparts.
   
3. Eachindividualpuzzlepartmustconsistofatleastfour,butnomorethansix hardwood cubes that are permanently attached to each other.
   
4. Notwopuzzlepartscanbethesame.
   
5. Thefivepuzzlepartsmustassembletoforma21⁄4′′cube.
   
6. Somepuzzlepartsshouldinterlock.
   
7. Thepuzzleshouldrequirehighschoolstudentsanaverageof______minutes/ seconds to solve. (Fill in your target solution time.)
   

SubmittalCreate a project portfolio to include the following:

• Design Process Description, summarizing your work during each step of the design process
• Documentation, include written work, sketches, CAD parts, images, etc. to support your discussion. Specifically, documentation of:
• Brainstorm sketches of all possible part combos
• Cake layers for both designs
• Choice design, with explanation of why this is the best choice
• Multi-view for each part of final design
• Assemblage of one part from your partner's multi-view sketch
• CAD parts of final design

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Inventor Resources

If you're feeling ambitious, you've already created all five parts in Inventor, and you're ready to move on, you can create an assembly and drawing of your puzzle parts. This video gives a detailed explanation on how to do just that. (Please note that the cubes he is using in the video are 1/2", unlike our 3/4" cubes.)

Learning from videos like this can be incredibly helpful! Do some Googling of your own to find Inventor resources that help answer any questions that you may have.

Cube Quality Control

Today’s consumers are constantly trying to judge the quality of products. But what is quality? How and by whom is quality determined? Some would say the designer creates specifications, which in turn dictate the quality of a product. That quality is also based on the acceptable value of a part within a whole product. Statistics are commonly used in manufacturing processes to control and maintain quality.

This activity will allow you to apply statistics in order to analyze and determine the quality (as measured by the consistency of the size) of wooden cubes. The wooden cubes will be used in the upcoming Puzzle Cube Challenge. You will design and construct a puzzle cube as part of the challenge. The consistency in size of the wooden cubes will affect the quality of your final product.
 

Equipment

·         Engineering notebook

·         Pencil

·         Dial caliper

·         27 wooden cubes per student

 

Procedure

  

1. Each of you will receive a set of 27 wooden cubes (3/4 in.). Label each cube (1 through 27) lightly in pencil. Measure the side length of each block along the grain. When taking a measurement, position the block so the caliper measuring surfaces are touching the end grain faces. Record the measurements to create a data set. For this analysis a precision of .001 is necessary; therefore, record each measurement to the nearest one thousandth of an inch (.001 in).

2. Use Excel to perform a statistical analysis of the data to determine each of the following: Mean, Median, Mode, and Standard Deviation.                   

Create a histogram to represent the data. Use seven to ten class intervals (bin values). Be sure to label your axes and define units where appropriate.

 

 3.    Does your data appear to be normally distributed? Justify your answer.