Illiana's Make It Real Develin Gym

Hey There!

This is Illiana’s civil engineering design team. We will be walking you step by step through our engineering process for Make it Real’s Develin Gym Challenge. All of this was made through the joint effort of our five team members. Ryan - as the team leader I glued many pieces together and took an active role in assigning assignments and parts of the project that required an intensive amount of problem-solving. Jenna - being our in-home RevitCity Queen I spent most of my working time finding and creating furniture and workout equipment. Travis - in this project I spent most of my time fussing with the lights, walls, windows, doors, and floors. Josh -being the ground-up specialist I spent most of my time outdoors working on such projects as the soccer field, parking lot, and green roof. Brandon - being the biggest team helper; I spent time helping everyone with their assignments.

We hope you enjoy it!

PS: We have organized this instructable so that the first paragraph is giving a general overview of the process a project like this should undergo (in our minds) and the last paragraph is what we did more exactly for this specific project.

PPS: The Engineering Process steps will be abbreviated as such: EDPS2: Brainstorming / List Possible Solutions in the form [Engineering Design Process Step #: Title in this context / general title].

A product requirement sheet

Computer

Architectural software - AutoDesk Revit

Notebooks/graph paper

As much time as you can spare

Thinking, Thinking, Thinking

For computational thinking, you want to look throughout your whole project and try to find things that need to be balanced, added, or removed. We found that looking through comparable real-world projects or building codes helps decide on these things. Graphs, number charts, or even just a tally count can help with this part. Often we don't really bother with writing things down; instead opting to instantly insert it into the project which we do not recomend -- leads to a lot of struggle, "Why did we have three trees here?" "I'm not sure I think it was in the one fire code though." The less time you waste double-checking past work the better.

Steps in relation to computational thinking were done throughout the project but considering they were such a big deal we decided to commit a beginning step for it.

Like in the instructional paragraph we used a basic building code to help guide our design process in all aspects. For example, we calculated our maximum occupancy, which came out to about 440 people. We used lots of windows to provide natural light according to solar orientation guidelines, and we included emergency exits throughout the building. We also tried to put the appropriate amount of exercise machines, a commons area, and seating based on our maximum occupancy number. We also included a green roof and living wall to help with emissions and stormwater runoff.

What are we doing again?

In step one of the engineering process, you want to define the problem. Looking at your product requirement sheet, you can do basic research into the area and write a summation statement to help guide the overall design. We also like creating a list of things we need and want in this step as well.

First, we watched videos on the project to help create a background on top of the contest write-up prompt. We created the project rubric based on these things. Then we researched gyms in the area and the local community. Next, we researched rehab facilities and other previous submissions for this project. Then we put together a chart of all the elements we needed and wanted in the project. We finalized our list and stated our problem: Design an all-inclusive local community center incorporating the environment using an engineering mindset and computational thinking.

So Many Decisions...

In List Possible Solutions, you take a look at the previous steps' product and then split from the group and draw as many possible solutions as you can think of. Depending on the circumstance, you then present every option to your group or condense your own designs into a single design and then present that. Your group then picks the plan that they wish to do or plans they wish to combine and works towards finalizing the said solution.

Using our problem statement and elements list as inspiration, we broke off and sketched our own floor plans. Then we came back together with our best sketches, and we presented them to each other. We wrote down likes and dislikes for each design. (Ryan and Jenna's were selected and agreed upon). Using the likes and eliminating the dislikes, we combine the two best designs to make our master sketch. Finally, we set to work on our Revit design.

Nail and Hammer but instead it's Keyboard and Mouse?

In this step, you work towards creating a prototype based on the finalized solution created in the last step. Depending on the type of project you will either want to create individual parts and combine them later or assign different aspects of the design to different people. This is generally the place where you will spend the most time, run into the most problems, and change the most in the design. You have to be flexible, have to be good at searching Google, and most important: levelheaded. Without these things, you will just get angrier and angrier.

We know this project would take strategic planning in order to get everything done correctly. We assigned jobs and deadlines using a Gantt chart. This chart allowed us to track our progress and budget time outside of class to finish what didn’t get done. We faced many trials including a corrupted Revit central file, a curved glass wall and green wall, and a pool. Our laptops wouldn’t let us work on the project at home, so we all came in and worked hard after school.

Time, Time, and More Time

After you have created your prototype, you want to look through your design and add things that make the design seem fuller or fix issues that you find. Sometimes this will take minutes, sometimes days. Really depends on how thorough the previous step was.

Once we had the basic structure, we added windows, doors, floors, furniture, lights, and outdoor equipment. This is what took most of the time but there isn't very much to explain, considering the fact we just had to find and put in many items. We had issues finding the equipment and ensuring it was showing up in the right view and wasn't crashing the computer, etc. Refining the design was a grueling but satisfying process that resulted in quite the fantastic renderings.

Technology, am I right?

In this step, you present your full design to your teacher, client, or whatever you created the project for. You present it based on your design criteria to make it obvious how your design is better than all others.

We had a lot of rooms to render. We had eight different computers rendering at once. The pictures turned out a little dark than expected because our artificial lighting did not show up, but this gave us an opportunity to add more windows. We also decided not to paint the walls because we wanted to hire local artists to create murals throughout the building to make the space feel like a part of the community.

Let's be real, you aren't reading these

We decided to put all of the pictures in this step, as well as put a few wrap-up thoughts in. First off, thanks for reading this far! We hope you enjoyed reading through this project as we had a blast creating it. Feel free to comment with any questions or thoughts and we will answer ASAP! We hope that this would be an inspiration, either for the community center or for young STEM teens. Have a great day!