Solve a World Problem:
During the end of freshman year, first semester, our STEM class began the Creative Engineering Design Project. The purpose of it was to show us all the problems in the world and to create a small solution to one of those problems. My group (Howard Fry, Zoe Null, and Lexi Sittenfield Parkhurste) decided to base our project off over population. We noticed that overpopulation is a huge problem and we researched many articles on it. While doing this, we found that most articles talked about how overpopulation wasn't the biggest problem, pollution was. All the articles talked about how overpopulation is an issue only because more people pollute the world. We don't actually know how many people the planet can sustain because so much of our planet is covered by pollution and we waste and over consume so much. We decided to base our solution off pollution, and more specifically, how much we recycle.
After talking to our custodian and researching, we found out that our school had a bunch of recycling bins not being used. Our school was throwing out all our recycling and it was going into landfills. Our group decided that it was time to bring recycling back to San Marin. Our decided solution was to place recycling bins out around our school.
During the end of freshman year, first semester, our STEM class began the Creative Engineering Design Project. The purpose of it was to show us all the problems in the world and to create a small solution to one of those problems. My group (Howard Fry, Zoe Null, and Lexi Sittenfield Parkhurste) decided to base our project off over population. We noticed that overpopulation is a huge problem and we researched many articles on it. While doing this, we found that most articles talked about how overpopulation wasn't the biggest problem, pollution was. All the articles talked about how overpopulation is an issue only because more people pollute the world. We don't actually know how many people the planet can sustain because so much of our planet is covered by pollution and we waste and over consume so much. We decided to base our solution off pollution, and more specifically, how much we recycle.
After talking to our custodian and researching, we found out that our school had a bunch of recycling bins not being used. Our school was throwing out all our recycling and it was going into landfills. Our group decided that it was time to bring recycling back to San Marin. Our decided solution was to place recycling bins out around our school.
How It Worked:
Deciding on what to do for our project was the first step to our project. After that, we needed to decide on other things. Our group decided the best way to do our project was by putting multiple recycling bins out around the school in the places most people ate. We decided on 6 cans. To test how many people actually recycled, we put out the cans right before a 15 minute snack break. We made sure they were in easy to reach places and waited to find results. During the 15 minutes, we got a decent amount of recycling but also trash in the bins. We left the cans out through lunch too and made a graph to show our data (on power point). We only were able to test this for one day due to a time limit, but we found that a lot of teens don't care for recycling, but a lot also do. Our final decision, based off our data was to continue using the bins and to try and encourage recycling. Our next steps would be to try and place information signs out about recycling to show how important it is and to show our school videos about recycling. We also thought about making it more fun by doing things like putting basketball hoops above recycling cans.
Reflection:
During the time spent on this project, there were some easier parts and some harder parts. One of the things I felt was really positive was the research on our project. My team made sure to know all the facts and that is why we came to a better project than our original plan. For example, from research, we realized how our plan to study overpopulation did not have an easy fix. One other thing that went well was how my grouped worked together. I feel that we really worked our hardest as a group and everyone was included and did their part. Even when people were absent, we all did our part.
Although I think our project was filled with positives, there were also some negatives in our project that we could have improved on. Individually, I feel I needed to make sure to use all my time resourcefully and remembering how much time I really have. As a group, I feel we could have thought after more problems before coming to the idea of overpopulation. Although it is a really important idea, it also made it hard to find a solution for. Overall, I thought this was a successful project.