Engineering students in the first-year design course have been thinking outside the toy box. As part of their fall term project, they designed toys for children living in refugee camps.
“We always liked the idea of toy design because it’s a very approachable concept, and you don’t need significant design background,” says Khosrow Farahbakhsh, a professor in the School of Engineering who teaches the first-year design course with Prof. David Lubitz. “Everyone is familiar with toys,” adds Farahbakhsh. “It’s a great way of teaching design.” Some of the students have lived in refugee camps themselves, which gives them a unique perspective.
“It’s something they can relate to because we’ve all played with toys,” says Lubitz. Designing toys forces students to think creatively and apply their knowledge in ways that they wouldn’t typically do. It’s easy to make a toy for someone you know, but designing a toy for someone you’ve never met, who lives in another part of the world is more challenging. Whether the students are designing toys or bridges, the principles of engineering still apply.
“At this stage, they’re just beginning as engineers,” says Lubitz, “so before we get too wound up in equations and buildings and phenomena like fluid mechanics, we have them go through the design process and think about it as a process.” Each toy began as a prototype, followed by several drafts before the final version was complete.
The students were given several criteria: their toys couldn’t be powered by batteries or electricity; they had to be durable, inexpensive and easy to make from local materials; and they needed to be educational. Each team designed a toy for a particular age group and refugee camp.
The class consists of 380 students in seven different disciplines. First-year environmental engineering student Allison Small was part of a team that designed a game called bull’s eye ring toss. “We just wanted it to be something fun,” she says of the game. “Even our prof said it was fun.” The object of the game is to toss a rubber ring so that it lands within a ring of the same colour.
Teammate Dave Whitfield, a first-year mechanical engineering student, says the game teaches hand-eye coordination and projectile motion. One of the biggest challenges, he adds, was designing a game made of local materials that could withstand the rigors of child’s play. “You have to see into the future and think about what can go wrong.”
On Nov. 30, the games and toys were judged by a panel that included U of G president Alastair Summerlee, who is a member of the Right to Play organization.
“Play is a fundamental part of what children do and how they learn,” says Lubitz. For children living in dire circumstances, play also offers a welcome distraction. “On a basic human level, you need that distraction,” he says.
“Children want to play no matter where they are,” adds Farahbakhsh. “We hope that some of these toys will find their way, in some form or another, to refugee camps.”
In fall 2010, students in the first-year design course developed games designed to make math and science fun. The games were displayed at the Guelph Civic Museum, where they were put to the test by local elementary and high school students. The toys designed this year were evaluated by parents and prospective students during Science and Engineering Sunday on Nov. 13.