Solve a World Problem Project

For this project, the premises were kind of broad. We could pick any problem we found in the world ( world hunger, poverty, wet socks, hot pillows at night, pollution, ect.) and try to find a solution to solve it. While we had a broad amount of topics to pick from, my group chose-at first- to go with the issue of endangered sea life. While that in itself was a broad issue to try and solve, it was a good start.

Then we decided to narrow it down to a specific habitat and try to find a solution to help the aquatic life in that habitat. After some research on coral and mangrove forests, we chose to do our research project on Mangrove forests.

At first we researched ground information about Mangroves, but upon discovering that they were super important and that by saving mangrove trees we would be saving a whole ecosystem, ourselves, and about 65 billion dollars worth of property damage every year- we were set to go on this topic.

While this is quite a complicated topic in itself and there are no real solutions that could help solve it all- we decided to put together a list of solutions and pick the most effective ones out of all of them. About 35% of our Mangroves are being cut down for shrimp farming, which happens to be the biggest threat to the trees. While we couldn't just tell people to stop eating shrimp- we could make a pamphlet teaching people about the dangers of eating shrimp that was raised in cut down mangrove forests and how to avoid it.

Here below are pictures of our physical pamphlet explaining shrimp farming and where it is safe to buy shrimp: ( for California )

Here is a google doc. with all of our speaker notes for this slideshow :

Engineering design cycle :

The engineering design cycle is a pattern of steps that many engineers take when creating a solution or an idea that forces them to test their designs and improve them as the testing goes on in order to make sure they have the best product possible. The steps consist of :

1. researching the problem - finding good sources to read / use and taking the information out of them

2. imagining/brainstorming possible solutions, any solution is a good one in this process.

3. plan - weed out the unethical/unrealistic/infeasible solutions and narrow your list down to a few that could work

4. create -pick the solution you think is the best and start making a prototype of some sort

5. test the prototype - see if it would work in that environment, see where it fails and where it excels

6. improve the prototype- or remake it, maybe pick a different solution if you need to

Data analysis and annotations :

As far as research goes, we had to do quite a lot to find reliable sources and research papers that helped us inform ourselves on our Mangrove topic. Here is a doc that we put together at the end with all the links we used for this project and their respective topics on this project. Below are some of the annotations I've done- short summaries of almost every paragraph on three articles- to understand the research better. As well as articles and research papers-we had to read a few graphs and tables in order to understand how the loss of our Mangrove forests affected our real world in the numbers.

REFLECTION :

As far as this project went, it was much more focused on research and theoretical thinking than actual building. Some of the building solutions we pondered on were to build things like nets or add mudd into the waterbeds in which the Mangroves grow on. Our final solution was more of a behavioral solution and required teaching others about this problem and then telling them what they could not individually do about it. Overall, I did well on Cultural competence and cooperation. Our group worked very well and we explored every aspect ( economic, climate, jobs, housing ) of our solutions and how they would impact the world.

As far as qualities I could work on, I think I could work on my critical thinking quality. For this project-science our solutions isn't physical, we had to think and come up with solutions that would benefit everyone in the end- especially the Mangroves.