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Journal Entry #4

During service week, I worked mostly on further research for my gender medicine checklist and testing bits and pieces of my oral rehydration solution. I didn't see either Mr. Burkett or Mrs. Peck over service week, so I plan to touch base with both of them at the beginning of next week. As I discussed in my previous journal entry, I'll be meeting with Mr. Burkett primary to discuss my oral rehydration tablet, and with Mrs. Peck to discuss my gender medicine checklist.  This past week, the NormaLyte packets that I had been anticipating finally came in. They certainly have higher salt content in terms of electrolytes compared to the NUUN sport tablets and the commercially available oral rehydration solution. However, they also taste like they have a higher salt content; when I interviewed a few of my close loved ones regarding their experience with trying the NormaLyte solution, while they reported it effective, they noted that the high salinity content is definitely noticeable a...
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Journal Entry #3

- Updates with Research  Since my last journal entry, I've been going through a trial and error phase of working with my salt tablet. I planned in my second journal entry that I would work with the NUUN electrolyte tablets to see if I could work with that recipe for creating my own salt tablets. I'm glad that I worked with the NUUN tablets I have at home because while they seem fabulous for light-intensity athletes, I don't think they'd be sustainable for POTS patients. The most possibly viable edition of the NUUN tablets for my research would be the NUUN sport tablets because they have the highest number of electrolytes with 300mg of Sodium and 150mg of Potassium. As I previously mentioned, while this may be suitable for electrolytic recovery after a workout for an individual with a traditional autonomic nervous system, NUUN's electrolyte numbers are measly compared to that of the commercially available oral rehydration solutions.  The recipe that I've been wor...
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Journal Entry #2

So far with my project, I've been finding really helpful resources that have contributed to the work I've been doing on engineering my salt tablet. I've already procured some NUUN electrolyte tablets to work with, but I'm holding out on testing with them until I can get a better grip on what I'm testing for.  With regard to my flow chart, Atul Gawande's book, The Checklist Manifesto , has been nothing short of a nostalgic throwback: we read part of his incredible piece last year during my Intro to Medical Sciences class. In my opinion, I think Gawande does a fantastic job of covering a wide variety of fields, not just those in medicine, where checklists have made a large improvement to the working environment, the safety, and the overall final outcome for the customers/patients. While there haven't ever been checklists made to mediate the gender bias that exists in medicine, I think The Checklist Manifesto  is helpful for me to see how these resources are cr...
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Journal Entry #1

For about two years now, there have been two personal research interests of mine: the medical system's ignorance of cis-gendered women and POTS disorder. It all started at the beginning of the pandemic; my anatomy and physiology teacher at the time had bravely decided to put her planned curriculum on pause and instead prioritize more discussion-based learning while we were all at home on distance learning. During this time, we had been assigned a few Ted Talks to watch, take notes on, and then discuss, and one happened to be titled "Why Medicine Often Has Dangerous Side Effects for Women."  That day, I ended up falling down a several-hour hyperfocus session, certainly much longer than I had originally intended on the subject, but the idea of an entire portion of the population being excluded from equitable medical treatment was just too horrifying, shocking, and interesting or tear my eyes away from reading. A few weeks later, and after some more hours invested in researc...
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Rube Goldberg Project

 In contrast to some of the other design processes that we've used so far in the applied STEAM class, the Engineering Design Process as it relates to Rube Goldberg contraptions required my team and me to do far more trial runs and testing. Usually, the Engineering Design Process would be rather similar to other design processes. In fact, the Engineering Design Process has many overlapping steps and a similar outline with the process for product design: a design cycle that my classmates and I have individually experienced as we went through our product design project.  The Engineering Design Process starts with a problem, then calls for background research and specific requirements surrounding the problems at hand, and then a series of prototypes and testing, depending on how well the proposed solutions can solve the problem and meet the requirements. In this case and with Rube Goldberg specifically, our initial starting point isn't so much a problem, but rather a prompt. Our p...
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Robotics

 For our robotics unit in our STEAM class, my partner and I worked with a VEX IQ Clawbot. We started by building the Clawbot from pieces and parts per the provided instructions. If my memory is serving me, it took about two to three days to fully build the robot. In order to make the process go more smoothly, we discovered it was most efficient if one of us found the needed parts and one of us attached them to the robot for the next step. We had a system going where each set of parts for the next step would be put into a styrofoam bowl in order to stay organized and keep the steps in order- "The Bowl Method," as we called it.  (our finished VEX IQ robot)  To get the full experience, we alternated who found the parts and who built the robot. Overall, our method was pretty successful and we had very few minor slip ups. The only things that really posed much of an issue were the parts themselves and inconsistencies between the directions and the pieces we were working with. ...
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