Evidence Of Work:

Our task was to select a world problem from a vast majority of choices and my group with Lindsey, Analiese, and myself chose the topic of Racism towards Social Media. We chose this topic because racism is a big topic especially nowadays considering the following protests that have been going on so we decided to do this topic since it is the most relevant topic in this generation. We each first started annotating long articles and combining the information we got out of them to use in our final presentation. After annotating, we started discussing multiple solutions to our problem and in the end, we came up with the idea of an activity that we can present to 5th graders so they can learn to be safe on social media while getting to know their classmates better. The activity is taught on zoom by having different prompts that present different characteristics and if that prompt applies to you, then you turn on your camera when starting with cameras off for everyone. By this activity, the kids can learn to appreciate others differences and realize that those differences shouldn't truly define them.

Engineering Design Cycle:

1. Identify Need: We chose our problem in class where Mr. Williams told everyone to jot as many ideas as we can on a shared google doc and so I was assigned to the category of equal rights. I was satisfied with this conflict because I had multiple idea solutions in mind that I can present to my team already.

2. Research Problem: Over the span of a few days, we annotated articles and discovered a lot of information about racism towards social media so we decided to directly solve towards that problem. During this process, we didn't choose to create or search up solutions at that time.

3. Brainstorm Solutions: Our specific problem that my group ended up doing was "Racism on Social Media" because we thought it would best fit with the category of equal rights.

4. Choosing a Solution: Racism as a whole cannot be solved since everyone's perspective and acts are different from one another. In order to find a solution, we first got our science notebooks and listed as many solutions as we can whether if it's possible or not. We then chose the most brightest and the most creative one which was to create a slideshow activity directed towards a 5th-grade society so they can learn about racism and how it affects others while having fun. We chose this solution so the kids have an early understanding of verbal biases and that we can reduce the discrimination in the future.

5. Developing Prototype: We first created the main activity slideshow filled with different prompts representing characteristics about you and your life. The activity was mainly based on distance learning so we decided to focus the activity towards zoom. So to start, all the kid's cameras would be turned off and a list of prompts will appear in the slideshow. If it applies to you, you get to turn on your camera but if it doesn't, the camera stays off.

6. Testing & Evaluating: Sadly, we didn't get to test it out on any group of kids since we are isolated in quarantine. We were hoping to test it out on actual 5th graders but in the end, our teacher really liked the idea of it so we were satisfied.

7. Improving Prototype: Our prototype was really well planned out well so we didn't need to improve anything so instead we just focused on our own individual slides while helping each other out when needed.

Reflection

Overall, I feel like my group and I did really well on this project. In the beginning, we thought that this topic would be difficult to solve but as we pushed through it and maintained a positive mindset, we completed it with a lot of thought into it. The only difficult part was researching the topic because equal rights can be spread out into countless amounts of categories and we were stuck on which one to choose. We had to get really creative about our topic and how we can create a solid solution that would be interesting without making it boring to our audience. During the process of this project, I feel like we demonstrated Cultural Competence because we did really well at understanding each other's point of view towards things, and in general, I had a blast working with my teammates especially with a long project like this.