Week One – Summer Started!

Hey everyone! My name is Melanie Horkan and I am so excited to have the opportunity to continue working on the ARCHER Creative Inquiry through Clemson University over this upcoming summer! I have been involved with this program for the past two semesters and have really enjoyed working with the elementary students to help them as best I can. Being involved with ARCHER has helped me become even more confident that I want to end up working in the medical field after graduation so I can continue to help other people as much as possible.

Throughout this first week, I have done a lot of different things in order to prepare for the upcoming weeks to make sure that I end up accomplishing everything that needs to get done before the summer is over. I have created a schedule of weekly goals to follow in order to help me stay on track. Additionally, this week I created the basis for the website that I will be working on to help display everything that the ARCHER program has accomplished over its two semesters as a Creative Inquiry at Clemson. So far, I began by explaining what the Creative Inquiry program is so people from other schools will be able to understand the way the projects are set up and how everything got started. I then went through and explained the ARCHER program and how the main goals are to build adaptive sports equipment for kids with disabilities. Clemson University has been paired with two local schools working with five different younger students. The sport that has been focused on for the last two semesters is archery.

On the website, I introduced each of the five students that Clemson has been working with and explained their unique situations. This will hopefully be helpful in the future if there is another student who is facing similar setbacks when trying to participate in archery. There will already be a design made that has been successful in the past that may be able to help this new student as well. As the summer goes on, I will be making complete user manuals for all the devices that have been created by the Clemson students in this Creative Inquiry over the past two semesters. All of the manuals will be posted on the final ARCHER website so they will be easily accessible. By posting this information, it is the hope that students in other schools facing the same problems will be able to use one of the devices already made in order to be successful.

So far, I have set up a simple outline for each of the user manuals and have almost completed one for the first design. Within each manual, there are three sections: diagnosis, parts list, and assembly instructions. The diagnosis section further explains the disabilities the student faced and clearly explains why each aspect of the device was able to help them. In the parts list, information about the size, material, and where it was purchased from is given about all of the parts used to put together the device. Finally, there explicit step-by-step instructions with pictures and drawings in the last section of each manual. This should make it very easy for someone else to rebuild the device and have it functioning in the same way when finished.

Next week, I am hoping to have the first two manuals completely done, start cleaning the CI lab space, and come up with a solid plan on how to modify one of the devices made this semester that did not work completely as planned.