Creating A Prototype Nutritious Snack Bar Designed for The Youth's Well-Being and Awareness of Malnourished Children

Living in an area where the low and upper class is exposed to all its residents creates an indiscernible bond within myself and my neighbors. Especially since most of my childhood, I grew up playing and spending time with the neighbors' children that seemingly were not entirely taught about the dangers of eating junk food and unhealthy snacks continually. Some of the children that I met seemed either overfed or merely malnourished due to their limited education on the risks of an unbalanced nutritional intake. Families that are financially struggling and are living in low-maintained areas are more likely prone to diseases, especially the children. This issue brings me to the thought of, what if I could create a type of food that was financially and ergonomically accessible for the children in poverty-stricken families.

My initial goal was to make a healthy, nutritious, simple, and practical snack that I would distribute directly to malnourished children. However, due to time and cost constraints, which were still entirely dependent on my parents, I decided to adjust my final goal statement into learning how to create a prototype nutritious snack bar designed for the youth's well-being and awareness of malnourished children in Jakarta. I chose this goal because of my concern to the people situated in Jakarta’s impoverished areas, having an unstable source of food and income. It made me realize that the least I could do to help the families is to somewhat replace my role as the parents, which is helping the children grow and nourish as they age. With creating this bar perhaps could spread awareness to help the impoverished families that are in need.

The snack bar prototype that I will be making is shown as an example of a nutritious snack that can be used as an idea for people interested in creating a snack bar business at an affordable price. This goal is highly challenging for me since I have no knowledge of a child's essential nutrition needs at a certain age. In addition to that, children are demanding in terms of food that they want to eat. By and large, each child has their preference for food. Usually, children are more interested in instant or fast food nowadays, and besides that, healthy foods seem generally expensive in the minds of parents. Thus, I must manage to create quality healthy food at affordable prices. Therefore, helping parents who receive limited income provide nutritious food for their children to ensure their growth is maintained.

Global Context

The global context that I am focusing on is Scientific and Knowledge, as it investigates how I would use my knowledge attained from learning about the basic nutrition needs of a person to creating a snack bar that will perhaps help educate and raise awareness to other people regarding the nutrition affects to our daily activities. By having the purpose of attempting to impact the community with the global context in mind, will further motivate me in doing this project as it shows me how a mere scientific advance (snack bar) could help others.

Product

In order to achieve a successful and organized final product, I created three product criteria as a guide for me to follow, as well as level descriptors for each criterion that will be then used to assess my final product in the end.

The most basic yet essential basis in developing a product is knowing the product's clear and understandable functionality. Without a clear and evident portrayal of the product’s functionality, achieving this project's goal will seem impractical to the audience. To achieve the highest level, I must incorporate and emphasize the aim of creating this snack bar by establishing an engaging way to communicate with the audience on this matter. Quality content epitomizes the importance of the product's value, therefore having trusted ingredients for the snack bar and a reliable method of making the product will be the course of approach to the criteria's highest-level descriptors. The product's quality content will be assessed through the usage and accuracy of the product ingredients and the nutritional value of the snack bar itself.

Aesthetics revolves around beauty, appearance, and appeal since these are the fundamental concepts of what the aesthetics of a product should be. Nonetheless, aesthetics is influenced by people’s senses (touch, smell, hear, and vision) and emotions for every object that a particular individual employs. The aesthetic for this product will be entirely assessed from how the packaging and the food itself is designed, organized, and developed. I must be able to design it in a simple and captivating way through knowing the different esthetic elements for reaching this criteria's highest level

Reflection

Throughout this personal project, I have learned numerous skills in different aspects: balancing time and work, knowing particular views in the scientific and social world, or even practicing my communication skills to connect with other people. I have realized that most of my prior knowledge mentioned has developed significantly by recognizing how I chose final decisions and took risks for this project. At first, I figured creating a food product that can improve one's nutrition state by simply only eating the product that I made seemed optimistic but then realizing, it was not entirely realistic as to how humans need to experience the tastes of various kinds of food out there. Thus, I thought that rather than creating the product entirely designed to feed the malnourished, a different approach to it is to educate and establish awareness on how our nutrition intake affects the health of our mind and body, at the same time outreach to the upper/middle-class people in raising awareness about the poverty-stricken families struggling to find food for their children. Relating to the global context, Scientific and Innovation, I can now fully grasp how malnutrition in our society began, ergo creating an efficient snack bar for all. This gave me a broader and deeper appreciation of understanding how the minor issues in our world could even impact various major issues discussed by world leaders as of today (i.e., economically). Consequently, it has motivated and guided me in knowing the next steps of my project, simultaneously shaping my project's result/overall process.

IB Learner Reflection

Experiencing the IB curriculum has shown me how to grow as an individual that continually looks up to the IB Learner's Profile as a role model. Throughout this project, I have used most of the profiles demonstrated but, the most significant ones are the Caring, Inquirers, and Balanced profiles. According to the IB, the Caring profile shows “empathy, compassion, and respect” (IBO). I have considered doing my project based on impacting the community, even though I had every chance to devise my project solely on developing my personal hard skills. Doing this project has shown me how to be more caring and compassionate to the community as I tackled the issue of malnutrition amidst the impoverished children in Jakarta. Brainstorming ideas on how I could potentially help them made me show more of my inquiring and caring side since I tried to empathize by putting myself in the parents' position and ask myself numerous questions on how I could let my children grow and nourish well as they age, with little to no income in the family. With wanting to present all the solutions I had, I finally chose to create a snack bar that could help raise awareness to the people around me regarding the issue. Knowing how challenging it is to make a snack bar product since I never had any experience creating such foods like this, I had to balance the work for creating this product with the assignment given by other teachers. I continuously experience stress in my life lately, as the tasks and projects assigned tend to be challenging and require more time. However, these issues have trained and developed me to be a better individual. I have learned more about balancing my physical, intellectual, and emotional well-being by effectively using my time-management skills.