This week our focus was figuring a way to get the poles to stand upright on their own, and building it at semi-full size. Our solution was to have the poles rest in 2 blocks of wood that are screwed to a platform that allows the whole thing to stand. The string across the two poles has remained the same, but in the next iteration we are going to change this to allow a user to shoot without holding the bow itself, only holding back the string.
We gained a lot of useful information from Madi’s feedback as well. She told us that the height of the stand should be about her own height. She also told us that designs can rely on the fact that Madi will always be right next to the kid using the bow, meaning that she can do some of the work of aiming or aligning and that the build itself doesn’t need to necessarily have those features built in.
This is also beginning to split in two projects, one for indoor use and one for outdoor use. While it would be nice to have a design that’s universal, the conditions for indoors vs outdoors are dramatically different (flat vs uneven terrain, trees vs no trees, hard vs soft ground), and it makes sense to play to these strengths when possible.