VII. Group Reflections

1. What are the local or global issues that your project is trying to address?

Many people in the world are malnutrition and they often pass away due to this. They cannot afford to eat food and go hungry for many days.We want to solve world malnutrition since fermented products would easily give people the correct nutrients. Fermentation helps break down nutrients in food, making them easier to digest than their unfermented counterparts. For example, lactose — the natural sugar in milk — is broken down during fermentation into simpler sugars — glucose and galactose ( 20 ) (Coyle, 2020).

Our project plans to help to give these nutrients and enzymes to the less fortunate so that many of them do not die of malnutrition. We are finding out how the type of rice affects the rate of fermentation so that the food can ferment faster and be brought to the people faster and in larger quantities. From our research, we came out with a hypothesis that Japanese rice would produce the most amount of alcohol and Glutinous rice would produce the least amount of alcohol. The reason behind this is that glutinous rice has a very low amylose content which the yeast can ferment and turn into alcohol.

2. How have your team made progress in personal effectiveness during the course of this project?

We had put in a lot of effort especially in this research. We could conclude the results of the rice alcohol level after researching on the way to use it. We had a limited time to do many things so we had no time to waste and set aside many things to get ISS done. We learnt on the importance of not procrastinating and learnt how not to procrastinate. This enhanced our effectiveness as we were able to learn and know how to get things done faster and without delay.

3. How have your team made progress in inter-personal effectiveness during the course of this project?

We had to document our research to our team members and since we had too many things to research on, we could split the research among our members. This enhanced our inter-personal skills as we communicated better. We managed to split the work well evenly among our members. Our group also provided the 6 types of rice to each other which helped us with our collaboration as we had to collaborate well in order to get the rice to school on the same day. This project allowed us to communicate and collaborate more effectively which definitely enhanced our interpersonal skills.