Make It Loud!

My favorite class challenge this semester was the “Make It Loud” challenge. Jeffrey and I started out thinking we wanted to make some kind of flute or whistle, but after surfing through Tinkercad and Thingiverse, we I decided to try and make a percussive instrument of some sort. When we started out, we looked for percussion on Tinkercad and Thingiverse, there were things like miniature drum sets and mallets, but none of that spoke to us. I finally thought of something from elementary school, a percussive croaking frog, like this :

So we took to Tinkercad once more, this time looking up designs for frogs. We found one that you could actually tell it was a frog and decided to mess with that one. The first thing we decided to do was add a conical hole inside the frog’s belly, opening up into the mouth so any sound that he made would be amplified. I think in the end we could have stood to go without that feature, but maybe it did help. We didn’t make a solid one to find out the difference. We then added multiple ridges on the frog’s back by inserting rectangular holes of varying sizes. We also changed the look of the frog a little bit. Originally, it’s feet and eyes were very bulbous, we thought it looked better a little more flattened out. When we finally got to print, the only real issue we had was with the mouth opening. We printed without support, so there was nothing to support the moonlike mouth shape, so a rogue strand of filament ended up hanging from the frog’s mouth. It ended up looking like the frog was catching a fly, so we decided to keep it. At our printing station there is a square piece of plastic by the brand Cricket that helps get objects off the plate. Funnily enough the “Cricket” made the frog croak the best. However, we found that using a quarter created a very froggy croak as well, so that is the piece we would recommend using since most people have quarters. Below is a picture of our design and our final print:

We came in second in the challenge. Miranda and Kaitlyn won with a maraca that they filled with pennies, which was indeed quite loud.  Creativity wise, I think we nailed it. It was fun for me to have a set goal, instead of just sort of having free range and making whatever comes to mind. Overall, it was a lot of fun and now we have a little percussive toy our son can play with once he’s a bit older.