Ideation & Prototyping Week 2
For my endangered animal, I decided to go with a giant panda. Giant pandas mainly eat bamboo shoots and live in the mountain ranges in central china of Sichuan but the ones that lived in the lowlands are being driven out because of deforestation, farming, and more. Scientists don't know why these bears are black and white, some speculate it's so that they are invisible in rocky and snowy mountains. Some think that it helps pandas see each other from far away to avoid socializing since they are solitary animals... which resonates with me as an introvert.
I thought that their dietary info was pretty interesting such as that pandas have a thumb and can hold bamboo. They have a digestive system of a carnivore but their diet is primarily herbivorous, they have microbes in their gut to digest cellulose that they get by eating their mother’s poop after they are born. They eat about 26-84 pounds of bamboo a day, use the bathroom 40 times a day, and since they can’t get that much energy from bamboo, and usually avoid laborious activities. In captivity, they are fed more nutritious things to supplement bamboo.
Due to their low birth rate, continued habitat loss, and being hunted until made illegal, they became endangered. China went on to help regrow the panda population and has successfully brought their numbers up. Giant pandas are among the world’s most adored and protected rare animals now with about 1800 left in the wild.
“Giant Panda.” Smithsonian's National Zoo, 16 Sept. 2020, nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/giant-panda.
“Giant Panda.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Sept. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_panda.
“Giant Panda.” WWF, World Wildlife Fund, www.worldwildlife.org/species/giant-panda. I really like pandas since I think they best represent my spirit animal, big, capable of wild things, but would rather sit around and peacefully eat bamboo. I also really liked the kung-fu panda movie and how cute and fluffy they look.
By sketching my panda, I was able to simplify the forms and point out an important feature to focus on that makes a panda recognizable. For me what makes a panda is that it has bear features compared to something like a dog are things such as its distinct muzzle and round ears. Being black and white is what separates a panda and a regular brown bear, and of course its specific facial markings.
The first thing I did was stop recycling my recycles, washing, and saving everything.
I laid out some of the materials and tried to figure out what would work where and how.
I made a stencil with some simple paper and pen and traced my drawing on some black styrofoam I got from a beef packaging I think. I repeated the process for the nose, ears, tail, and eye decals.
I had a leftover takehome container from a restaurant that I used for the head, I cut out a circle from some white cardboard that I placed in the container and used a smoothie top for the muzzle.
The body base is made from two styrofoam blocks that I hot glued together and I used some black berry containers that I cut up for the arms, legs, and upper body that I also hot glued together with popsicle sticks to help.
I finished up the build with some eyes I cut out of the white cardboard and drew pupils with a black pen, along with some claws I cut from the same white cardboard. I was pretty happy with the outcome, as a bonus, he also sits up like a teddy bear. Overall it was a pretty fun project with an interesting design limitation using recycled materials. I feel like I haven't gotten a chance to exercise my creativity in this way since elementary school.
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while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
print 'Iteration ' + i;
deck.shuffle();
i++;
}
print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';