Solve a World Problem
Our Project - Our goal in this project was to find a solution to a world problem and my group chose homelessness. We did some research and found that many homeless people tend to lack basic resources and that's all they spend any money they get on. Our solution was to create a resource van that will travel to different places all over California and provide basic needs to homeless people to help them get back on their feet.
Engineering Design Cycle
Identify a Need
After considering many options for world problems that we wanted to focus on, we chose homelessness. There are a lot of aspects to homelessness so knowing that we can't fix everything, we decided to focus on providing basic needs for people that make up the homeless population.
Researching the Problem
We decided to research a lot of different factors that had to do with homelessness. We mainly focused on homelessness statistics, the reasons that people become homeless, and other solutions that people have tried.
Developing Possible Solutions
We started with a brainstorm, just throwing out ideas. We came up with a lot like food and clothing drives, tiny home towns, and many more. We went through our lists and eliminated some ideas that either weren't ethical or had other issues. This narrowed it down to a few solutions to choose from.
Select a Promising Solution
We ended up incorporating some of our ideas into one idea. We had thought of things like clothes and food drives and recourse centers, and we ended up wanting to design a traveling resource van that would provide things like clothing, hygiene products, food, and many other things but there were still some things we needed to figure out.
Create a Prototype
We thought of our main idea. We wanted our resource van to travel around the U.S. and provide basic needs. We wanted to include clothing, hygiene products, food, counseling, and access to computers for job applications. We decided we wanted two different vans to travel together and that we would incorporate food and clothing drives into our idea as a part of the resource van, we would take donations.
Test and Evaluate
We realized that donations weren't going to cut it on a financial perspective so we looked into government funding which ended up being a really good solution so we changed our goal to make our presentation a pitch for the funding. We also created a food donation bin as a part of our food drive idea. We would take packaged foods that were left uneaten and unopened from students at schools like San Marin, and donate them to our resource van. We also realized that the entirety of the U.S. was a lot to take on so we decided to start in California.
Improve and Redesign as needed
Once we had all the details it was just a matter of putting all the pieces together. We ended up making some changes to how we wanted to set up the trucks, we made some edits to the design of the food donation bins, and finished up our pitch and presentation.
Reflection
I think that this was a really good project overall. Me and my group did a lot of critical thinking when finding solutions to problems that we faced. I think that this also showed character, we needed to figure out the best way for the homeless population to be taken care of.
I do think that I personally struggled with conscientious learning throughout this project. Seeing as it was much more versatile, it made it harder cause we were setting our own deadlines. I also think I could have worked on cultural competence by exploring the same issue of homelessness in other cultures.