The Oasis

Welcome to The Oasis! We are McKenzie and Ryan (team of two) and we hope you enjoy our community center that promotes relaxation, fun, and community bonding. Whether it is meeting a new friend on the playground or in the community garden, The Oasis has something for everyone! So step in and have a great time!

To complete our project, we needed a few things to support us. All online tools that were used were free or provided to us as students.

1. Google docs for planning and writing explanation
2. Gemini/Claude for image generation and AI reference
3. Tinkercad for design
4. Time
5. Time
6. Time

To start out, we created a Google Doc to dump ideas and plans for our community center. In our doc, we listed characteristics we wanted our community center to have as well and structures we wanted to include. While not all of these ideas were realistic, many of them made it to our final design. Here is our original list:

Structures

1. Children’s Play Area
2. Community Garden
3. Meditation Station
4. Community Kitchen
5. Solar Panels
6. Plants
7. Library
8. Courtyard
9. Gym/Track/Pool
10. Stairs and Ramps for Accessibility

Characteristics

1. Friendly
2. Comforting
3. Welcoming
4. Earthy
5. Relaxing

With these ideas in mind, we wrote a detailed prompt to Gemini, and using Imagen, generated a few designs after going back and forth a few times. Above is the design we decided on. Clearly it is different than what is shown in the introduction, but it was just a preliminary design that we started with.

Our first building step was creating a circle. We liked this idea best because it was unique and helped us add all of the features we wanted like a pool and playground, all while being in the same space so people could feel connected. We ended up deciding that the circle would be "dug" out of the ground, and the main building would be beside it, at ground level. We also felt it was important to add a ramp for accessibility.

After creating the building and foundation, we wanted to add stairs before anything else. This turned out to be a very challenging aspect of this project. While attempting to make them, we found that making curved stairs is not very easy. We ended up using the more recently added revolve tool. While it took MANY tries to get it right, we ended up learning how to use it. The main benefits of it were that:

1. We could create a stepping up design that was perfectly aligned and repeatable
2. We were able to easily manipulate it after creation using the sweep and start controls, which was the main reason we decided to go with it

Making these curved stairs was an example of pushing Tinkercad to its limits to get the most out of the usually easy to use platform.

The water in our community center is one of the main features. While it can have a calming and relaxing effect on people, it can also be fun to play and swim in. Rocks and water go very well together, so we decided to add a rock mountain that included a water slide so it is fun for the kids who decide to play in the pool. Along with this, under the rocks, a small cave can be seen for people to hang out or relax in. We also added a fish pond. Many of the shapes used in this step were premade, and we considered not using them. Instead, we decided that we should not reinvent the wheel, and used what we had to make a better project by using our time more effectively.

To really make the community center feel at home, we added some furnishings, including a grill, a play set, a bench, and a set of swings. For the final touch, we added some plant life and a tree growing from an outside area in the building. These make the center feel more like a home, with things that you would find in your very own backyard.

Since we did not have proper tools to create a physical model, we decided to make a theoretical model. While not ideal, we were once again able to use Gemini to render a "model" of what it might look like if we were to make a physical model. That is what you saw in the introduction. We also made another rendering of what it might look like in real life. While we did not get everything we wanted to incorporate, we focused extra on the small details and pushed Tinkercad to really get the most out of it. In the end, we were able to achieve our goal of creating a welcoming and relaxing place that we would enjoy spending time at!