In this project, we were tasked with representing a system from the human body. A body system is essentially a collection of organs that work together to accomplish a common goal. We were assigned the excretory. You're probably pretty familiar with one function this system carries out, peeing. The excretory system's job is to get rid of waste created by a cell, as well as remove excess water from the body. This helps the body maintain homeostasis or the natural balance of fluids and PH level. This was a very challenging project and resulted in many revisions of the model. This is because nature engineers things on a level far above that of humans and the excretory system is no different. As you can see from the slides above, we mainly focused on modeling the kidney. The kidney is actually made up of millions of smaller filtering units know as nephrons. These tiny filters contain three layer tissue in which some of the blood is allowed to pass through. This tissue consists of endothelium, basement membrane and epithelial podocytes. The liquid that passes through is what the urine product will mostly consist of but after this process, some nutrients and water will be reabsorbed. As you can see, this is a highly complicated process and not to be taken lightly. The first challenge began with finding a suitable filter. We settled on a lab grade filter but this amazing filter still had problems. The body's natural filter is specialized to only let certain substances through. We could not be so precise. Also, the body's filter allows the unfiltered blood to continue on while the filtrate is removed while our unfiltered liquid is removed. There was no way to completely fix this problem so we had to resort to pulling extra blood from a different source and labeling it filtered blood. In the end, we were able to represent the kidneys role of filtering as well as map out the path of the blood and filtrate travel through the system, ending in the bladder. The audience seemed to enjoy the presentation, especially the somewhat comedic end where we pulled a stopper and the project "peed," gushing out a large stream of somewhat yellow liquid. Other than the occasional laugh or compliment, we did not receive much feedback.
Reflection
We grew tremendously throughout this project. At the beginning we barely understood the system and didn't take the time to research it in great detail. As the project went on however, we learned a lot about the system. While we understood all the concepts and represented enough to meet the project requirements, we had a major flaw; the build quality. If I had to rebuild the project, I would not tape the parts together and use a Gatorade bottle. Unfortunately due to time constraints as well as many revisions to the original proposal, this would not have been feasible.