5/18/18

The day before we finally go out to the Oak-dale Theater and introduce out project to the many other quilified students in the expo fest event.

5/8/18

Today's the day we present C.N.M outward, we have everything put together. Just a few more fixes in the website, props and C.N.M will be complete, ready for the judges and other projects to see. We even have costumes up for temporary mascots, t-shirts for every individual member, a possible banner. The field team is DIYing everything and saving some money in the process. We have reached out to many people. A manager from Stop&Shop and others. Our team also created a skit that will be included in the "Crush No More" presentation.

5/7/18

A day before the official dead line. We have little time to work on anything we have left to do. Reviewing over the companies and people we attempted to get in contact with, many of them answered back but, with answers such as "it's confidential" or "we cannot help you." We even had one person tell us to "go to college." We're feeling stressed that we won't actually have "Team Advisors." The entire team shouldn't blow over not having help from professionals. We all still have done research and have precise information about our product, cereal in general, packaging, etc. One group was working on the presentation, another was working on creating social media posts while the rest of the group was editing photos or working on the web site.

5/3/18

A fresh monthly start to Expo Fest and it's project goals. The solution the team has came up with is making fully biodegradable Ziploc bags for the cereal & surrounding them with two biodegradable air bags attached to the box. The measurements for the cereal related information is within the data page. The "Process" page contains pictures of the situations and experiments we went through in order to test and come up with biodegradable bags. Our team created a social media outlet (Twitter and Instagram) and used them as an advantage to reach out to other cereal companies. Since of course we have serious goals the procedure had it's ups and downs. The due date draws closer and we're nearly done, wish us luck as our groups work more.

4/30/18

In today's meeting, the team has finally tested out the said prototype. If you check on the process part of the website, you can view many of the photos that have been uploaded and captioned. We've found a store manager from Stop & Shop and are going to attempt to email her, with some of our own questions. It's been a rough day with testing, taking nearly 3 classes worth of time. It'll be worth it once the team sets everything up. At first, it seemed hopeless, that a prototype would never be made, but we possibly found a definite solution. Last is the CER, and even though it seems easy enough to type a claim, evidence, reasoning, etc. we're still struggling with it. Thus this is the last blog post for April, here comes May around the corner.

4/27/18

The past 2 days have probably been the most productive the team has ever been, and even though we haven't came close to solving the "problem" we've done A LOT of research and revamped the website, as well as coming up with a logo. There was some editing in the blogging here and there. The date to have everything submitted is May 8th and although the website is a work in progress, we may be able to finish it soon enough. We have been thinking of adding another page to show off the data visually. On the 26th of April our logo group finished the logo which we have just found out today.

4/25/18

Finally we have come back to do Expo Fest again after an extremely long break. Many people came back from D.C ; having no idea what happened and what needed to be don before a quick catch up session. We are now researching for about 2 hours and 15 minutes so we can catch up. We have been trying to reach out to a packaging company and university who specialize in packaging science and we haven't got any responses yet. It's going pretty slow and nearly the entire team is feeling discouraged but hopefully we can get back on track with some input from outside help. We are excited that we now have permission from our district to start using social media.

4/11/18

Most of the team is now on a 3 day break so now we only have 4 others working on the C.C.P data. They're attempting to compare cereal data, upload photos, and take videos, in order to find a solution. We're having some trouble uploading photos, which is important since we need to contrast our research with them. The researchers looked into finding a estimate of how much Americans spend on buying cereal per year/week for individuals versus a whole family. Our guide has finally sketched out the plan and steps it'll take to make this project. The four members have been given 1 research task or data to collect, so eventually we can get to the hands-on part of possibly making a prototype. We still waiting to hear back from all of the companies we have emailed.

4/10/18

It is the day before the Washington D.C trip and part of our team will be gone for three days , not to mention April vacation coming right after, so we will be out of school for a long time. The team is working to try to get as much as possible done.Things are currently being weighted from the cereal itself to the bag to the box, so on and so forth. We are looking at the weight of crushed versus un-crushed cereal in each bag as well. We decided to focus our attention on Frosted Mini Wheats because our observations showed this cereal had the most visible crumbs of the 4 cereals we looked at. Hopefully we can get all of our measurements done so that we can start to test some things. The logo will be coming up soon, we're looking forward to that. We also have some people trying to contact a packaging company. It's expected we get in contact with them so the team can talk about packaging. That's all for today. We'll keep you up to date with what is happening in a about two weeks.

4/6/18

We started to test our ideas on how to solve the problem. We started to weigh the cereal and the cereal box and bag. So far the testing is off to a good start. We still have a way to go before we are completely done with everything. We measured the size of the boxes, and found that the different types, brands aren't uniform and you have to look closely at the weight at the bottom because that changes as well. That's all for today. We will need to gather more resources. Our teachers were going to purchase us some additional supplies. We discussed what types of materials to use. Some of the students in our group felt strongly about making the stuff environmentally friendly, most of us agreed that was a good idea. So our teachers found biodegradable bags online they are going to bring to our next class.

4/2/18

We have started our website which is called CNM which stands for "Crush No More", we are writing about the problems we have faced in the past and how we got to this point. We are continuing to create the website while there other groups doing the logo, research, and contacting universities and companies. We only temporarily used a logo from the internet but then realized if we presented it how it was we would been accused of copyright and we didn't want that. Some of the students in our group starting asking what type of packaging we should use. We were testing with materials we had on hand.

3/21/18

We have obtained a vacuum sealer and it was small but it was still good to use for this experiment on how it won't be crushed or turned into powder. We've sealed three different types of cereal into this container and it was successful. We took note on what happened when we did this. Plus we put more air into the bags and then put very little air and then we shook the bag seeing what would happen to them. By our surprise, it was the one with the minimal air that was the best. We took lots of pictures and videos while using the cereal and vacuum sealer.

3/13/18

We started to make questions on how we could stop it from being crushed or turning into powder when ever it was delivered to a store or to a home. It was going good and the amount of people that left our group could be seen because it used to be very huge and now we're small but we're mighty. We're ready to go for the next step and that step was experimenting.

3/5/18

As a group we decided the ideas we had been working on were a bust because all the product ideas we were coming up with regarding cell phone cleaners ALL existed. We had to go back to square one. We decided to go back to our original brainstorming session. The only thing that seemed like it might have potential was crushed cereal, this would have to be our new focus.

2/28/18

Mrs. Rizza is back from maternity leave & wants to be caught up on what we've been doing. We have been split into groups researching part of the wet wipes and self cleaning cell phones. My group was researching on parts of wet wipes and how they are made and what is required to make them. This was tiring because it was extremely quiet and all we did was go to sites and try to find good evidence how they are made.

2/23/18

There were already hundreds of responses towards our survey and some were from the other one where they criticized a bit just for fun sake though. It turned out that we have won and now we're doing wet wipes . Now that we had the responses we could use that data to give us ideas on how to tweak our project so it can be a lot better.

2/16/18

We have continued working on our surveys and we are extremely close to finishing. Then some stuff happened when people were accidentally deleting some questions and answer which delayed us valuable time. Even though stuff was deleted we have finally finished our surveys today. It has been difficult to keep the momentum going with snow days and delays.

2/8/18

We finally got our surveys and we started to work on it immediately, which was going great. We made questions for the people thinking about who would read it and if it was actually worth it. We couldn't wait to read teacher responses. Now we continue to research on this criteria impatient on finding out who's idea will go through.

2/5/18

Our teachers decided we had to do a survey so people in the school including teachers could put in how useful the product would be to society and how much they would be willing to pay for the product because it would require money. We started off on a rocky start where the Wet Wipes didn't get a survey and the turbine wheels were already working on their survey and some of our group went into their survey which literally messed everyone up.

1/31/18

An average day back into Expo Fest, and the ominous research continues. The teams were breaking into even smaller teams! Different techniques and purposes, all possible solutions but, none of them have stepped up their game in being the formal solution. Little did we know, it was pointless to re work in the self cleaning phones and turbines criteria since for one, the cleaning techniques already existed. The car turbines didn't suit as an appropriate project because the deadline and the literal fact we were 13-year old's. The team didn't want to turn back to the drawing board just yet.

1/23/18

The team has finally decided to work on self cleaning phones and car turbines. We are aware that those are 2 different projects so we were separated into 2 groups. What would work better? Wet wipes, uv lights, sprays? The additional car turbines plotted on how to hook up turbines to modern cars, and different power sources. The phone cleaners team researched all types of screen cleaners to see which we off limits and ones that didn't exist.

1/18/18

We are trying to figure out a target audience by watching yet another video and thinking about how we can know our audience and what will they think is more interesting, beneficial and that fits their needs. Some other people are struggling on choosing a project to work on. This feels like an extremely long time without a project idea. The time is still ticking and we're worried about the amount of work we'll have once we start to work on the project we'll finally choose, we used a decision matrix to score our ideas based on things like how easy it was to make, how well it met our objective, what types of resources were needed etc.

1/11/18

An example of projects that don't focus on world-wide problems we came across this website called Gravity Light. The problem was electricity in Kenya, some people couldn't afford to have light and used kerosene lamps; which are in fact very toxic causing respiratory diseases and environmental problems. The prototype works like this, you pull a cord attached to a light and a 12 kg bag slowly. As you lift the bag up with the beaded cord, the light turns on and the cord may be let go. Over time the bag will drop back onto floor in a span of 20 minutes, which can be repeated. A-lot of science goes into this as the light uses kinetic and potential energy. Their team's main goal was to provide clean, safe lighting while ridding of kerosene lamps.

1/3/18

We came back stuffed from a great holiday vacation and it was the break we needed. It was time to do lots of research just to get to one subject. Continued research is still taking place and we have to hurry with picking a project and putting those tutorials into some good use.

12/21/17

With winter break around the corner, and the Holidays approaching closer with a promising 2018, Expo Fest group was struggling to stay focused. We still have to consider how far everyone has progressed into the project, about a couple weeks and all we have is research and a most likely solid project idea. Self cleaning phones and car turbines. Without even the research we had already knew their were many different versions of digital screens being cleaned. The team believed we could make a better version for cleaning products for devices. This hasn't been made official yet but this may be our project.

12/18/17

Despite the chilly weather, the team returned back to "headquarters" for the next step. Everyone opened the canvas page with the expo fest dashboard. Apparently, we were having some technical difficulties with opening certain documents. Although, we all put in our best effort to work with what we already have, we needed those files. Mrs. Lombardi attempted to fix and add on activities for everyone to do. With a small agenda of additional research, the team was sent back to their normal classes for the day.

11/30/17

We did another lesson about making decisions from the skills 21 website. Brainstorming is still going on and we have even more ideas; which one will eventually become the topic we choose? It's getting harder by the minute the more topics we come up with. While brainstorming itself wasn't complicated, we had to pick a topic under specific conditions such as, it couldn't exist already, and it shouldn't be a world-wide problem such as world peace. We cut down to 4 topics and the entire team was split into 4 groups to focus solely on research and prototype plans. After some research on some of these topics, we all had an organized chart if the topic could be potential for the team. Questioned such as "Does this take a closer look?","Will it fit our schedule?", and "Can our team actually progress and make this topic a reality?" We added up the scores of each idea and broke it down. This was also a meeting without one of the team advisers. She left for her maternity leave; it was going to all be on Mrs. Lombardi to guide us until Mrs. Rizza returns.

11/27/17

The group was given our very own canvas page with the tutorials, modules, docs, and a chat. We mostly submitted our brainstormed ideas and thought about with them with care. For example, phones powered by carbon dioxide was a great idea, but it wouldn't fit in our time span for May deadline. It started to fill up pretty quickly and their isn't a confidence that we'll have any problems with coming up with our project. The students were all very creative and abstract with most of their ideas. Introduced projects like pajama clothes, additional turbines for cars, special cleaning UV lights were exposed to the team. Expo fest, was beginning to be taken seriously even if we didn't have a full on plan yet. Our teachers showed us videos from the Skills 21 website and past expo fest winners.

11/20/17

Another late meeting into November and almost everyone understands the basics of what we're doing. One problem, to be solved in a prototype situation. The focus of the project was "taking a closer look". We discussed what it means to take a closer look, everyone had different ideas about what that means. Some kids think that it is about looking at things that are small, or using a microscope. Some of us thought it had to do with being really focused on an aspect of a topic or issue. A few more tutorials on "How to think like a Googler", and so many more for us to begin research into possible project ideas. One question that is always most difficult at first, What was this team of middle schoolers going to do? Brainstorming was a very important step into a creating something, especially in this project. Top of the head topics anyone could come up with. More people contributed to the pile of ideas but never actually decided on a specific one to look into to.

11/9/17

A bunch of students discovered that they were chosen to be part of the Expo Fest program. We had been instructed that our first official meeting will be held on November 15th which sparks excitement, but why was Expo Fest considered special? It's like a combination of Science Fair and Invention Convention and Sharktank to a professional field, which means it can be presented to the public community.