CAS Creativity - Ping Pong Machine Design

We have been playing ping pong for 1.5 year, which we have started to play at the beginning of IB1, in school. The school has a ping pong table and we are playing every day. The problem we have been facing from the very beginning is that we lack of ping pong balls. Due to we don’t have any area to store balls, we bring them at every break and then leave it. They were lost and every time we need to bring another ball. In a day, sometimes we lose 2 or 3 balls and therefore, everyone was complaining about the lack of balls. This problem leads me to find a solution and find that we need a ping pong ball storage area besides the table. My friend Arda joined me in this process. I organized this event as a CAS Creativity Experience and I designed a compact ball machine which we all can access easily to it. It has a suitable design for both to store balls and to put balls into it after playing. At 8 May, I visited my uncle, he is a mechanical engineer, and we assembled the machine. He also helped me to draw the mechanical drawing of the machine.

I was always bad at time management, I have been struggling during the process of doing something and leaving it until the last minute. But in this project, in a limited amount of time, I decided to do a ping pong ball machine and actually produced it in a short time. I’ve already identified my weakness on time management and develop it accordingly. I wasn’t previously actually undertaken this skill, I’ve always had struggles about time management on many IB Internal Assessments, projects and also in my personal project.

I planned this CAS creativity experience and I can say that this can be my best organization ever in IB program. I collaborated with my best friend and decided to find a solution to a common problem in a short amount of time. I designed the structure and shape of the machine where my uncle helped me about the technical interface and assembling it. I showed my experience about this project and planning, by collaboration with my friend.

With the help of the contribution of my friend, we planned this project in a pair. He sometimes denies what I said and thought of a different design, which were the challenges of the process. The benefits were deciding in common and sharing the costs of ping pong balls. Overall, doing this project with a pair, rather than by myself is great.