Summer Semester Blast-off
Sprint 1 (or 7, if you’ve been paying attention): URANUS
Listen up, Earthlings. This one is gonna be short. Why? Because I just finished writing all about our quarantine diary study and I’m tired of writing.
Sprint 2, already? Are you sure??
It feels like just yesterday that we logged off of Zoom after our Spring research presentation and promptly turned off our brains for two weeks. And it feels like maybe the day before yesterday that we were assigned this project to begin with. But here we are, and it’s time to Design Something.
Our end goal for Summer semester is to have a demo-able prototype for a solution that will empower astronauts to diagnose problems autonomously, using best practices, critical thinking, and documentation.
How are we going to get there? Prototype, test, iterate. (Say it with me. Prototype! Test! Iterate!)
The goal of Sprint 1 was really to pry our hands away from the safe, tempting world of research and start making things — even if those things are just low-fidelity sketches, and even if those sketches kind of suck.
Our end goal for Summer semester is to have a demo-able prototype for a solution that will empower astronauts to diagnose problems autonomously, using best practices, critical thinking, and documentation.
What We’re Working on Now
- Prototype! Test! Iterate!
- Research around other diagnostic tools in analogous domains
- Revisiting background research
What We’re Working on Next
- Prototype! Test! Iterate!
How We’re Avoiding Losing Our Minds
Not gonna lie, it’s been a weird adjustment going into summer semester. Not only are we working 100% remotely on Zoom, but now we are only working on capstone. Consequentially, our days are more or less devoid of structure other than the structure we implement for ourselves. Oh, and also the world is a giant dumpster fire.
I know I’ve personally been reading a lot, playing Animal Crossing New Horizons a lot of a lot, and going on walks. I’m currently reading The End of Policing by Alex Verso, which by the way is free to download.
JT, always the overachiever, has been baking.
Media Recommendation
Obviously, it’s the launch! For most of us, the crewed Dragon launch is the biggest launch event of our adult lives. For all of us, it is the first crewed launch on American soil since the Shuttle era.
If you missed the Launch America livestream — or even if you didn’t — , the highlights reel is worth a watch:
