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Jelly Pop Group Blog

Kelplastic Group Blog

10/9/19

We had today off school; Sarah and Gia looked into competitors on our plastic idea. Gia’s looking into allergen risks and prices on possible materials and thinking of tests for the end product. Sarah’s looking into the damage traditional plastic causes.

10/29-10-30

We worked during school today; Sarah looked into more competitors on our plastic idea. Today, Gia cited the research document and added it to the list of our competitors.

1/24-1/31

We forgot about this document so sorry about that but today, Gia and Sarah worked during stem, Gia came up with the name for our project “Kelplastic” as Gia decided to use Kelp as our main material alongside flax meal. She also looked into prices of materials and came up with our expected final cost. She also worked on the website. Today Gia was making possible slogans and added pictures to the website. Later Gia Georgia Sarah and Angel decided on a slogan “Kelp is fantastic, not plastic.”

2/3-2/7

We came up with our logo, which would be a kelp leaf in a plastic bottle. Since Gary would be coming to see our project idea, we planned the roles of each member and how we were going to present. We are pretty much ready for the presentation.

2/10-2/19

We changed our slogan to “Save the ocean one KelPlastic at a time."

3/3-3/4

On the third Gia and Georgia called for 2 hours working on a script, looking for kelp experts and seeing if growing our kelp is an option. On the fourth, Gia and Sarah called for an hour and a half, Gia emailed Bren Smith, a kelp farmer, and non-profit owner, while Sarah messaged GNC and Whole Foods seeing if they would send us kelp or flax meal, whole foods turned us down so we plan on mailing more places.

3/2 - 3/9

We are currently preparing for Expo Prep on March 12. Progress is a little slow because we are now a bigger group of 19 instead of smaller groups of 5. Even though we are all working in the same room together, it still feels like we are all working on different projects. Hopefully, we can get it together within the next week. Also, since our group was renamed Kel Jel, we had to come up with a new logo and slogan. Currently, we have 6 different logos and multiple slogans. The fastest way to communicate during STEM time is on our google classroom page. Ngoc-Anh created a survey asking which logo and slogan is your favorite? The winners are going to be the ones that we will use in our presentation.

3/10- 3/11

Luckily, the location of the Expo Prep was moved to our school for health and safety reasons. We now have more time to complete our presentation. Our progress got a lot faster and now we are moving at a better pace. Ms. Tangney is showing us helpful videos on how to market our product and properly grab the audience's attention. Also, the winners that were chosen for the logo and slogan survey was Meryam's logo and Ahella's slogan. So now our new slogan is, "Let's ring that bell for Kel Jel!" We were able to get our presentation done for tomorrow, but sadly we weren't able to practice together. We're pretty much done with the ideation stage and are going to move on to making the prototype. We have the list of materials and recipes ready for when that time comes. While the researchers are preparing for the tests and trials, the other team members will start focusing on marketing Kel Jel.

3/12

Today is Expo Prep day. We're all excited and kind of scared at the same time. It's the first time we are introducing Kel Jel to someone outside of our team that isn't Gary or Ms. Tangney. The people who went up to present our product was Feyza, Darren, and Gia. Our group actually did well for a dry run. Thank you to Cam, Liz, and Gary for giving us helpful feedback. They said that next time for our actual pitch, we should have fewer words and more pictures. They also advised us to not constantly look at the slides, but instead look at the audience while we are presenting. We are really happy that they liked our product. Next week, we will look more into marketing in order to grab the audience's attention. Not only did we learn about the many things that we could improve on, but Expo Prep also allowed our team to get closer to each other. Together as a team, we assigned jobs and talked about what we wanted Kel Jel to be in the future.

3/13/20

Despite getting everyone on the same page yesterday, school has been canceled from 3/13 to 3/31 due to COVID-19. The sudden school closure shocked all of us. We were excited and prepared to move on to the next step, but now we won't be seeing each other until another half a month. We are all trying our best to stay strong during these hard times. About half of our team is communicating through google classroom and Andes, our designer, made a digital drawing of Kelpie, our mascot. We are unsure about what our next step is going to be since we are in quarantine now.

3/14 - 3/18

We still don't have a response from Ms. Tangney about what to do for the next half a month. We are doing our best to take charge and get what we can do, done until we get a response. Ngoc-Anh decided to take charge and posted an assignment about the work we should get done while in quarantine. She made a large to-do list, a document with questions for the marketing group, a surprising stats sheet, and the documentation of the worksheet. Over the weekend, our team made a bunch of different business cards that we could use when this quarantine is over. Ahella made a survey asking people about the things that they wanted to see in the advertisement. Journey created our Instagram and suggested that we should have a group chat on snap chat. Having a group chat was a great idea, but not everyone has a snap chat or another device they could text on, so we are just going to have to stick with communicating through google classroom for now.

3/24/20

This is an update from Ngoc-Anh. Today, Feyza and I worked on some research for the pods. We decided that we couldn't wait until the end of quarantine to start doing some serious work since the quarantine was extended to the 20th of April. Together we planned that I will test to see if agar agar jelly can hold liquid inside of it, since I have agar agar powder at home. The only problem was that I didn't have any molds at home to do the test. Our back up plan for the mold was to use a bowl, but I have a limited amount of agar agar powder at home so I might not have the right amount needed to make the jelly. We aren't sure if we can still do the test anymore, but we will try to figure out something. We also talked about whether to buy our materials in large or small amounts. Then we decided that before we make any prototypes, we should finalize the recipes and pod proportions first. We needed to figure out how much body wash should each pod contains. After doing a bit of researching, we found out that the average amount of body wash that most people use is 2 pumps, a quarter size dollop is about 1 pump of body wash and you should use enough body wash to fill your palm. We also figured out that a good size for our jelly pods should be around 0.9 by 0.9 by 0.9 inches. Lastly, we decided that it would be better if we made our mold for the pods instead of buying them. We plan to have our new mold be made of two parts so that it is easier to insert the liquid body wash inside. Additionally, we found a recipe for making a silicone mold. So when we come back to school, we can hopefully follow the recipe and make our jelly pod molds.

3/25 - 4/2

Day by day fewer people are checking the google classroom. Also, our school has officially switched to online distanced learning, so we are going to be busier with school work and are not going to have as much time for Expo work. Our team is at the point of giving up now because we don't know what the future of Kel Jel is going to look like. Hopefully, the Kel Jel doesn't end up getting dropped because our team has already gone so far.

4/3 - 4/17

We are still waiting on the updates for Expo Fest. The google classroom is practically dead. Easter has already passed by and there are still no updates. If we were actually in school right now, we'd probably be done with making our prototype and would be making surveys to send out to our school community. Most of us have already given up, but a few of us are still hoping for some kind of update. Hopefully, we can get some updates soon.

4/20/20

After what seemed like forever, we finally got some updates!! Ms. Tangney told us to stay positive and that we are all in it to win it! The launchpad has to be done before the 27th of May and also we will be having an online pitch. We have a lot of work to get done and not much time to do it. Hopefully, our team can get back together by then.

5/1/20

Not much work has been done since the 20th of April. It's just that everyone was so busy with other school work and then suddenly adding Expo fest to the mix, made it hard to get a good balance of everything. Our teachers will be hosting a zoom meeting this week to catch us all up with the new expo fest updates. We still have a lot of things to get done for Expo Fest. Our priority currently is the pitch presentation.

5/5/20

Today, we had a zoom meet with our teachers to catch us up with all the sudden changes. Sadly, about half of our teammates won't be joining us for the next step of our project. All that time that we spent doing nothing is starting to catch up to us. Time is not on our side. We have so much to do and barely enough time and people to do it. Ngoc-Anh used this opportunity to clear up some confusion about Kel Jel and get everyone back on track. She made a long list of things we have to get done within the next week and a half. She also used this time to conduct a 5-day long experiment to see how much body wash do people use on average daily. Everything was going well until for some reason our Kel Jel website no longer worked on our school laptops. Hopefully, that problem can get fixed as soon as possible because the website is a very important piece to our project.

5/6 - 5/7

Both TEMS expo teams had a meeting with Gary and Cam today at 11 am. They updated us on the changes made to expo fest and the modified scoring criteria for the middle school challenge. Our team isn't getting as much work done as we should. Despite the recent zoom meets and constant updates on the google class, only about 1/4 of our team is actually contributing to the project. In order to get more people working, Ngoc-Anh hosted a zoom meet to talk about Kel Jel and plans to move forward with the project. Only 6 people attended the meeting, but a lot of information about the project was shared. We were also finally able to get access to the modified scoring criteria which is extremely helpful!! Also, it was decided that the pitchers for our presentation would be Georgia, Feyza and Ngoc-Anh.

5/10 - 5/11

Hi, it's Ngoc-Anh again! Today, I made a survey that would be sent out to our school community. It had a variety of questions in it that would help our team collect data for both the marketing and research group. I think a week is all we need to collect the data. The survey was sent to students, parents, and staff so that we could get a variety of different opinions. We have exactly 1 week until our pitch presentation is due, so instead of waiting for someone to make the presentation, I decided to take responsibility to do it myself. Before I started doing anything, I watched a bunch of videos on how to market a product, give a pitch as well as a few shark tank pitches for inspiration. One of the videos I watched suggested that it is easier to write your script first, so you don't end up adding too many words on the presentation. Honestly, I couldn't agree more. At first, I didn't listen to the advice and tried to make the presentation before the script. After struggling to not pack the slide with a bunch of information, I decided to write the script instead. It was the best decision that I made for the longest time. I ended up working on the script until 4 am, but it was completely worth it.

5/12 - 5/15

Both Ngoc-Anh and Georgia worked on finalizing the script. Ngoc-Anh worked hard on finishing pitch presentation by the 12th so that the pitchers had something to practice with. On the 12th, both TEMS expo teams had a zoom meeting to make sure that everyone was on track. Compared to the other team, we were a little behind, but it was okay because our team was making a lot of progress compared to the other weeks. We were thinking of adding a plastic villain to be part of Kelpie's story in the pitch, so Darren came up with the name Delcycer. If you think about it, Delcycer is recycled backward. Our first design for Delcycer was made by Ahella. The design was based on a shark. The second design was made by Sarah. After adding a few things to him like plastic armor, Delcycer was the perfect villain for our pitch. On the 13th, all the pitchers had a zoom meet and practiced the pitch together for the first time. For the first run, it was really good, but we had a problem with the slide changing because it was hard to talk and change the slides at the same time. After the meeting, we asked people to volunteer to be the slide changer. In the end, Ahella was chosen as our slide changer. The pitchers had another practice session the following day, the only difference this time was that Mrs. Gray and Ms. Tangney came to watch. They gave us the advice to emphasize certain parts more and to be enthusiastic while pitching. They also told us to make sure that our microphones were all at the same volume so that no one's voice was louder than the other's. While the pitchers were practicing, Travis, one of our team's designers came up with the design for Delcycer's sidekick, Paul Yution and Sarah wrote the background stories for each of the Kel Jel characters. On Friday, the pitchers practiced the presentation once again, but with Ahella as the slide changer this time. Our team made a great amount of progress this week, but there are still things to get done!

5/18 - 5/25

This week is where team Kel Jel worked the hardest. Ngoc-Anh made a list of things that need to be done before the 27th, and that list was pretty long. There were various things that we needed to do including our concept paper, the advertisement, stories for each group before Kel Jel, our pitch, and finishing up on the launchpad. Our team had to divide and conquer and it is difficult to know what our team members are working on, so we have to communicate more through google classroom. The pitchers, (Ngoc-Anh, Georgia, Feyza) were busying practicing the pitch script and slideshow, but still, all did their best to multitask and get things done. The pitch was May 22nd at 11 AM and all the pitchers did great with the pitch, getting positive feedback from the judges. Most of the team members were more concentrated on the pitch and presentation at the time that we did not find the time to do the other things needed to be done. On the google classroom page, Ngoc-Anh and Feyza would post about what needed to be done, making sure to remind the other team members multiple times. Ngoc-Anh was working on the launchpad adding the research, marketing, and mathematical thinking sections. She is also multi-tasking and working on our website, marketing math, and more. Feyza was mostly working on the concept paper making sure it included all the things that should be in it. She also floated around and did things that needed to be done such as the Jelly Pop story. Ahella was working on the advertisement, making sure it is at least decent. Meryam was working on designing the characters and with Sarah who wrote the backstories to the characters. Meryam also worked on the website by adding stuff into the sections. Darren made the ad script for the advertisement and wrote the Kelp Bound story, and Georgia wrote the KelPlastic story and helped work on the website with Ngoc-Anh. The last days of working on this project before it comes to a close for the year were filled with hard work by the team members that stuck with Kel Jel till the end. Every single person who contributed is greatly appreciated by all.

5/26

It is the last day to get the work in and the group is working hard to put the finishing touches on things. Ngoc-Anh and Georgia on the website and Darren and Ahella on the commercial. Earlier in the day, Feyza, Ahella, and Georgia attended a Zoom meeting with our mentor and Mrs. Lombardi. The night prior, Ngoc-Anh and Feyza worked late on the launchpad and concept paper, really burning the midnight oil. Both worked all day long finishing up on everything, making sure there was nothing missing and fixing any grammatical errors. As we all look back at our journey through our year with Expo Fest, there was a lot of struggles that we had to get through, but there were also lots of great accomplishments at the same time. We hope that one day in the future, Kel Jel will not be a mere middle school project, but a actual solution in action against the plastic problem revolutionizing the use of plastic containers.