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Medusa is Team Crocodile’s product for 2.00b, Toy Product Design, an introductory class to product design. It is a helmet with silly string capsules embedded between snakes located on each side. At the press of a button, silly string will shoot out of the snakes. The toy is designed to facilitate a more high-tech, myth-inspired game of freeze tag.

Inspired by the myth of Medusa, we wanted to create a more hands-on toy that would facilitate role-playing in addition to play. After all, toys were one level, toys with games involved were another, but toys with games that could be turned into stories? That was a different level, because it was harder for children to get bored of of a toy if they could tell endless stories involving it.

The product idea came through many cycles of ideation, prototyping, and user testing. We were lucky enough to be able to play-test with the correct age demographic at the Boston Children's Museum. One such test, for example, solidified our idea of using silly string over other potential materials. We weren't always settled on the idea of using silly string. Some other ideas that we floated around were water and nerf pellets. However, when we were play-testing at the Boston Children's Museum using our water-helmet prototype, things got messy real fast: it was hard to see which kids actually got hit, because water wasn't the most visible and easily splashed. Nerf pellets held the same problem, as they could easily ricochet. They also were a bit more dangerous. The advantages of silly string are that it is quite visible, it is harmless and easy to clean, and it stays on the person that was hit. Silly string, it seemed, was a unanimous hit!

We used CAD to create the helment that we wanted, and 3D printed negative to use as the mold. Then we poured plastic resin into the mold to create the positive, the helmet. For the snakes on top of the helmet, we used blue foam that we cut and sanded down, spray-painting the snakes and the helmet to create the desired color scheme. We wired up an arduino that would be able to control the release of the silly string mechanism at the push of a button, and hid that within the helmet. Silly string would be able to shoot from both sides and the user could control which side. We made sure that the foam we used was light so that the helmet ended up being too heavy.

I helped to brainstorm ideas for the toy, design the prototype in SolidWorks, and build the final prototype. I also designed the logo for the toy on Illustrator, playtested with my team at the Boston Children’s Museum and in front of industry professionals to get feedback, and helped present during the final presentation.

(From left to right is Team Crocodile — Zoe, me, Eswar, Kevin, and Val — with our two lab instructors, Kalin and Bo, standing in the back.)

The illustrator files show the designs I made for our logo, which also featured on the t-shirts that I screenprinted for the team.