Our STEM Club has been working with charity Meru
OUR STEM CLUB HAS BEEN WORKING CLOSELY WITH MERU
The High School STEM Club have been working on a project to support the work charity Meru does for young children with mobility disabilities. MERU is a charity organisation that creates unique and assistive products for disabled children and young people. It offers a range of different products for children of all ages, starting from toy adapters to a specially designed powered wheelchair - “Bugzi”. The ‘Bugzi’ offers a unique opportunity for pre-school children with disabilities to experience independent mobility, often for the first time in their lives. Each Bugzi is tailored and adapted to the individual child’s needs, with the capacity to adjust seating and controls as he or she grows.
A member from one of the team decided to share with us their experience of working on the project.
"When I first joined the team, I got my friends to do it with me as well. As we attended our first meeting, we got the initial ideas of what our final products should look like and got to researching. Over the break my group members and I brainstormed ideas and started working on sketching out our project. Once our ideas were improved the teams started working on the budget. We had to look for affordable and good quality materials to move forward with designing the projects. One of the other member’s compiled all the designs onto a digital booklet-type document and we presented it to MERU. Pleased to say, the representatives of the organisation were happy with our ideas, just as much as we were. We enjoyed working on this project and are looking forward to designing the toys for the kids this year."
The objective for the STEM Meru team is to create and improve the designs, so that the charity could start testing it out. The main aim last year was to create a giant obstacle course with different interactive activities for kids to test the bugzis out. As the wheelchairs were created for children, the teams had to come up with safe, creative and fun ideas that would engage the kids to play and experiment with their new wheelchairs as much as possible. The majority of last year was spent with different STEM teams designing obstacle courses, the next step would be building these obstacles this year.
