CAS Project – Maker’s Space

 

When the term ‘CAS Project’ came to my mind, I always wanted to do something unique, something out of the box. So, obviously, my mind had already screened out mainstream options such organising sports tournaments, art festivals, charity events, and so on. Meanwhile, I enrolled myself for ‘Maker’s Space’ as part of my AS(Arts Special). I realised that I could build/make something extraordinary and out of the box with the opportunity I had with Maker’s Space. This would in turn, fulfill the activity and creativity components of CAS.

Maker’s Space provided us with a platform where in our creativity could be nurtured. I had 3 other classmates with me in this program. However, one of them decided to go solo. The remaining two(Aarsh and Pranjal) and I decided to team up and create something three times the capacity of an individual(considering that we were three people). Maker’s Space started out in the last week of July 2015 and ran until Feb 6, 2016, which was the date of our AS exhibition. In this exhibition, we were supposed to display our creations to parents, students, teachers and other visitors. We figured out that we had enough time to explore, think and finalize our project. For three months, our minds wandered like a pendulum from here to there, in search of ideas that were in our budget and realistic in nature, while acknowledging time constraints. Fortunately by late Oct,  we zeroed down onto creating a Foosball table. This meant that we had 4 months to execute our project. In November itself, we finalized the design after rigorous searching and brain storming. After inputs from our supervisor, we created a blueprint and ordered materials accordingly.

Even after problems pertaining to time, feasibility and budget were solved, there lay major hurdles in execution. First and foremost, we weren’t good at carpentry. Hence, we consulted our supervisor and she called upon the services of our school carpenter. He helped us out in majority of “how to go about using our material” issues. Putting up this table from 2D to 3D turned out to be harder than we could imagine. Waking up at 6 AM, catching 6.45 AM bus, working for hours, then studying for hours : is how our days in the cold winters normally went by. Results didn’t show for the first few weeks, but we were dedicated enough to put this through. However, we had our fun time too! Spraying paint on each others’ shorts, gluing anything and everything coming our way, meeting at Domino’s for work, exploring the city for materials and so on.

I think the execution of our project mostly aligned with what we had scheduled. Although we had tough time 3D printing the players, we were able to challenge our own patience skills through this. I also believe that a huge chunk of work was done because of effective coordination and collaboration. We habitualised ourselves to dividing every piece of work, in turn multiplying time left for other work. For example, once our carpenter(Kirit bhai) didn’t meet us at a pre-decided time and there was much work to do, with a less amount of time left . So one of us set out to find him, and the remaining two continued working. This was a rather insignificant example in terms of importance, but managed to enunciate coordination and collaboration effectively. Thus, we managed to overcome all hurdles and finished our project before the big day of exhibition.

I felt a sense of pride and achievement after completing this project. This Foosball table was aesthetic to the eye and fun to play. We managed to attract a huge crowd towards our project. It was an honour for us as the very first game was played by the Principal of our school. Maker’s Space gave me an excellent platform to showcase my creativity, and I think I did a fairly good job.