When you’re eating chips and salsa and finish a good chunk of the salsa in the bowl, it starts to get difficult to get salsa on your chip. There’s no salsa around it to support it anymore, so you are forced to push it up against the bowl. You twist and turn your chip, trying to somehow push the salsa onto your chip, but the dip goes nowhere. This is what the Guacastoppa is for. The Guacastoppa is a small attachment that you simply slide onto the edge of your bowl. It acts as an extension of the edge of the bowl, providing a seamless transition from your bowl to the Guacastoppa. The Guacastoppa curves and slants back toward the center of the bowl, pushing the salsa or guacamole onto your chip as you slide your chip up the side of the bowl. In addition, the Guacastoppa comes in many fun and unique shapes and designs, creating a festive party atmosphere.

          You’re watching the Patriots game at 1:00 and still feel a little hungry after lunch, so you take out some chips and salsa to snack on. You dump some salsa in a bowl and start eating. At first, you scoop the salsa onto your chip without too much trouble; the dip around the chunk of dip you scoop up gives resistance to your scoop, supporting it onto your chip. Soon, you’ve finished around 2/3 of the salsa in the bowl. You go in for another dip, but you can’t seem to get it onto your chip. There is no dip around it to support it, so you are forced to push it up against the side of the bowl. You struggle and try to somehow get the dip onto your chip, but the dip stays stuck against the edge of the bowl. You push the dip all the way to the brim of the bowl, and now you have nowhere to go. This is where the Guacastoppa comes in.

          One weekend, Mr. Moody texted us to share one of his big problems. He said that it was very annoying and difficult to scoop the guacamole he was eating onto his chip. James suggested, “What if the bottom of the bowl could push up so that way there is less of an angle," Leif suggested "Guac flavored chips," and Michael suggested that "you could make the guac container curved and make the chips in a corresponding shape so you can scoop out the last of the guac.” After this quick brainstorming session, Mr. Moody challenged us to come up with 21 ways to solve the problem; 7 from each person. The next day, we built our first prototypes out of cardstock. Leif made a basketball backboard and taped it to the bowl, and James and Michael were working things that would wrap around the bowl. We tried using many different materials: stretchy rubber, thick fabric, and paper, and expressed our initial ideas with model magic because  it's quickly-moldable.

          Our first idea was a form of chip clip with a board on the side of it that would provide a scooping surface for your dip. Sadly, this idea didn’t work because the salsa would just go underneath the bottom of the square shape and get stuck in the gap between the bowl and the square. This happened because the square was flat and didn’t fit with the curved edge of the bowl. This made us realize that we had to create a new, curved shape at the front of a clip. We began 3D printing things. We made a bulldozer-front-like shape that eliminated the gap. This solved that problem, but a new one arose. Since you usually eat chips and salsa while watching a sports game, we tried to add field goal posts to it, but they were too long and skinny to 3D print. With that failing, we wanted a way to make the object more fun, so we came up with the idea of logos. Also, we realized that the clip was very cumbersome and annoying to use and clean, and we decided that there was actually no need for a clip; the object could just hang onto the edge of the bowl using a hook design. This worked well after we fine-tuned it to fit the bowl, but it still wasn't perfect. The curved, bulldozer-front shape's edge still poked out from the edge of the bowl, and we wanted a seamless transition from the bowl to the Guacastoppa. 

           To achieve this, we made a bowl shape in TinkerCad, the 3D printing software we used. Then, we made the bowl shape into a "hole" shape that would create a hole in the shape we put it in. We made a Patriots logo and simply put the bowl "hole" in it so that when it printed, there would be a bowl-shaped hole in the Patriots logo that would allow it to slip onto the bowl perfectly. This eliminated any edge poking up on the Guacastoppa, and that is how we came up with our final product.