Laser Shark! — Kyle Richards

How do you learn to design injection molded parts? Take a drawing from a 4th grader, design a toy from it, machine your own molds and manufacture a production run.

We started out with this drawing from students at St. Philip Neri Elementary School in Chicago. From it, we designed a plastic shark toy, machined molds and injection molded a run of 100 parts.

Note: laser not included :(

Original artistic inspiration from some fourth graders

For a look at the final product, check out the post below from Northwestern's design school.

You can also read our final report here

Students presented their final plastic products yesterday during the Advanced Manufacturing and Molding (ME 340-2) project fair. Students were divided into 17 teams and paired up with fourth grade students from Nettelhorst Elementary in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood. Students drew designs for the teams to use for inspiration for completing a concept-to-production plastic part. This team was given a drawing of a shark, and they not only produced a shark, but also created a whirlpool tank for the plastic sharks to swim in. Students in ME 340-2 begin the class with product conceptualization and modeling, then move to tooling design and manufacturing, ending with the production of the final product. The fourth grade Nettelhorst class attended the fair and got to take the plastic toys home with them.

A video posted by Segal Design Institute (@segaldesign) on Mar 16, 2016 at 3:12pm PDT

Thanks to the rest of the team, Tom Liggett, Siyuan Yu and Jonny Glazier, for their work on this project!