Earlier this week we wrapped up and launched Edheads Design a Cell Phone activity at www.edheads.org. With the help of Motorola, as well as the Ohio State University College of Engineering we approached the idea of getting girls interested in Engineering careers.

It ends up, boys like to blow things up, build things, work with machines, while girls tend to stay away, but for what reason? The activity uses the idea that we can use design and engineering to help people (in this case senior citizens), not just give them something cool to look at.  In the end with the right product we can better their lives.

Edheads Engineering - Design a Cell Phone

Creating the activity was a short but rewarding process – we created a design application where users can build a near infinite number of different phone styles using our 100% script based phone builder. We had to put the breaks on certain aspects to fit the activity, but overall it’s a very intuitive and rewarding feature which has already been used 97,000 times in the first week since launch (based on our lesson tracking data).

Through the process we worked along side Ohio State, as well as Motorola engineers to create a situation where the user needs to not only research and design, but listen to consumer feedback in order to get the best sales results. If you ignore the research you won’t know what sort of phone to build, and chances of being successful go down quite a bit.

Interview the senior citizens

This is the first non linear activity we’ve built for Edheads, and it’s already proving its educational value based on user testing, critiques and overall response. For some additional information on the launch, check out The Ohio State Engineering news site for a little blurb on the project. Motorola also has a bit of info on their overall educational initiative used to help fund the project at their news site.

Engineering Sales Results

We have many more engineering project topics to explore, it’s just a matter of time and funding – next up starting late July we begin ‘Nanotech’ – something to do with fabrics, but that’s all I can say.