For me, learning design is not hard, but it does require time. I was so lucky to attend the Superhero Cyborgs event, where I had five straight days to just brainstorm and build. It was the first time I really got to sit down and think about building something based on my own body, experiences, and interests. Have you ever had a chance to do that? I know each of the experiences I’ve had in my life so far has set me up to create amazing things. I just never had a chance to tap into my brain that way before. You can do it too.
Let me show you how Project Unicorn started out as a fake hand with a glove full of glitter and slowly turned into a really cool-looking unicorn horn that shoots glitter.
First, I needed to come up with an idea. I had a chance to bounce ideas off adults and kids who weren’t part of my family. That created a judgment-free space to just throw fun ideas out there. I don’t think you have to design away from your family, but changing your environment sometimes can help you get extra creative—and people won’t just say they like it because they are your parents or your sibling!
Before we got too deep into our ideas, we got to test out how computer-aided design (CAD) works. I created a house with a chicken head on top. Why? Because I could! That’s the fun thing about design. If you can make it, you can test it out and see what happens.
We also talked about the goals we wanted to reach before we walked away from our experience. I wanted to build something awesome and have fun. One kid said he wanted to create a hand with blades like the comic book character Wolverine. (Whoa!) Another kid wanted to get better at using 3-D printers.
Next, we started talking through our ideas as a group. When my friend Sydney discussed wanting to shoot water out of her little arm, I knew I also wanted to shoot something. Glitter just seemed to be the right thing for me. We each were asked to sketch out our ideas.
I envisioned a 3-D printed hand that shot sparkles. (I also didn’t really know how to spell “sparkles” at the time.) With my concept, I put together a prototype. It included a hand and an arm that I cut out. I filled a plastic glove with glitter, put it over the hand, and tried to figure out how I could shoot the glitter from the fingers. It looked pretty funny. But this was when I decided to call my idea Project Unicorn. It didn’t even look like a unicorn yet, but it made me happy, like a unicorn!
This was when I had a big realization. I knew using a 3-D printed hand design wasn’t going to work. It hit me that I didn’t need an actual hand to shoot glitter! So instead I decided to build something around my arm using CAD. I had scanned a plaster version of my arm, and I was able to build a cuff that fit. Here’s what my design concept looked like at first. I thought I might want to shoot glitter from both arms.
To start, I attached air puffers combined with Nerf bullets directly to a 3-D printed cuff. It wasn’t very stable, but it kind of worked.
I brainstormed a few extra ideas and came up with a starburst design that could hold the puffers in place.
I took the concept I had with the air puffers, strings, and Nerf bullets and added it to the starburst. I threaded the string through the starburst to keep them in place. The final result created a glitter poof when I pulled the strings. It was cool, but I knew if I had more time, I’d create something even more powerful.
I had a lot of fun with that version, but I was motivated to keep working on ideas. That’s when I teamed up with my design partner, Sam Hobish. We got to know each other, and Sam challenged me to come up with all kinds of different ideas we could possibly add to Project Unicorn. While I created different design ideas, Sam was testing different ways to force the glitter to spray. He tried CO2 cartridges, but he realized they shot too strong and might hurt someone. That’s when we worked on the idea of using compressed air.
At first, we tried to go back to my idea of using a 3-D printed hand and combine a way to spray glitter out. I got so aggravated trying to get a 3-D printed hand to work, but we needed that failure to keep thinking of better and more fun ideas.
We returned to creating a tool that could spray and didn’t look like what people think I need. We had a chance to come up with a really fun idea—and we did! When Sam and I met in person for the first time, Project Unicorn turned into a unicorn horn! It would shoot tiny plastic vials of glitter with the help of tubing and compressed air. We showed this version off at Maker Faires and other big events.
The cool thing was that our designs weren’t done. Sam and I continued to meet online and talk about what worked and what didn’t work. That’s when we came up with a totally new way to shoot the tubes of glitter.
Illustration by Sam Hobish
I let Sam know that the idea of loading the glitter one tiny plastic container at a time was really annoying. I usually asked my mom to fill up the containers. It took a long time to set up, and she was super annoyed. So the concept turned into a new idea where I could fill a huge container with glitter. It still connects to an air tube and compressed air, but it’s so much more fun.
I am so proud of this version. The 3-D printed unicorn horn looks supercool. I love being able to shoot a lot of glitter all at once. But there was one more problem: we were using glitter that wasn’t good for the environment. The longer I talked about Project Unicorn, the more my mom and I heard about how glitter is a micropollutant. That’s why we teamed up with a biodegradable glitter company, BioGlitz. Now Project Unicorn isn’t harming the environment, and it can’t make anyone unhappy. Unless they just don’t like glitter.
