The Project

The project assignment was to chose a problem that is present and well known today as our foundation. Then, we would build off that by doing a ton of background research. When we were finished, our group had over 150 facts about our subject, which we chose to be Overpopulation. After the research was complete, we moved on to brainstorming and finding solutions for our world problem. After, we would build some form of prototype or model, which I will go into more detail down below. Then, our group created a slideshow, and to finish off the project, we did a presentation in front of our class that displayed our prototype and information about Overpopulation.

Our Process

In the beginning of this project, as a class, we made a list of world problems that we could possibly use for this project. Next, with our group, we had to decide on a topic, and my group chose Overpopulation. We chose this because it is a constant problem and it gets slightly worse and worse every day. After choosing our topic, the next step was to do lots and lots of research. We each had to come up with around 50 different facts to make sure that we were all experts on Overpopulation. After, we make a brainstorm list of possible solutions, and chose our final solution to be more of an educational approach and we decide to make pamphlets for people who do not know very much about sexual education or birth control. We did this by making two original pamphlets, one for kids and one for adults. The kids' one included information about birth control options and sexual education, and the adults' one included information about birth control options, sexual education, and also family planning. Once we had created these pamphlets, we looked into places where overpopulation was most present and in the poorest areas of that. We found that Middle Africa has the lowest knowledge of sexual education and birth control rate in the world, and so there is a lot of Overpopulation there. We then researched the most common languages used there and proceeded to translate our pamphlet into them. We only translated it into two different ones for our presentation, but we can definitely translate it into more, and we can also branch out into more parts of the world. At the end, we put together a slideshow (below) and gave our presentation. One thing that I would like to add about our project that someone had asked during questions about our presentation is, we aren't trying to stop people from having families and kids. We are just trying to slow down the rate that Overpopulation is growing and occuring and we want to provide more information to those who do not have it. Overall, I think it was a very successful project, and I think that our group went well about doing the assignment.

Here is our final presentation. We presented this to the class along with our pamphlets to show a way to slow down Overpopulation.

Engineering Design Cycle

Engineering Design Cycle Steps:

1. Identify the Need

2. Research the Problem

3. Develop Solutions

4. Select the Best Solution

5. Create a Prototype

6. Evaluate Prototype

7. Broadcast Design

8. Redesign and Repeat

To clarify, I combined a few of the steps together for some of the explanations below.

Identify the Need

As a whole class, we did this by making a list of world problems on the board. Then as groups, we chose our world problem to do this project on.

Research the Problem

Our group did this step by individually researching 3 more more sites on our topic to get 45-60 facts each. At the end, we had over 140 facts to use as background information.

Develop Solutions and Select the Best One

After we researched, my group brainstormed ideas for possible solutions. We first thought a good solution to Overpopulation could be birth control because it would be an easy thing to distribute to places, but then we thought that it would be too hard to make sure that every person got birth control and used it, so we switched to a more general solution, education. We chose this because it would be much easier to educate people than it would be to try and force/encourage people to use birth control.

Create a Prototype

Since we chose to do education as our solution, it wasn't really something that you could build a physical prototype for. So instead, we chose to make a pamphlet. The pamphlet holds lots of information about birth control and family planning. There are even separate pamphlets for adults and kids.

Evaluate Prototype

Since we wanted to spread our information beyond those who could read and speak English, we decided to translate our pamphlet. For the presentation, we translated it into 2 different Middle African languages, but it can be translated into many more. We chose to translate it to African first because Africa has the highest Overpopulation rates on the planet with not much sexual education.

Broadcast Design

We did this by making a 15 slide presentation that included many slides on general background information about Overpopulation, a few things that the general public can do, and finally, our solution/prototype.

Redesign and Repeat

For this project, there isn't really an opportunity to redesign and repeat, but we can take feedback from peers and teachers and put it towards ideas related to this project in the future.

Reflection

I think this project went very well, and for a short project, I think my group did really well with getting everything done and putting it together. Two things that I think went really well were our collaboration and communication skills. For collaboration, everybody put in a pretty equal amount of effort and I think we all worked well with each other. We also worked hard on the project and made sure that we got everything done on time. In doing this, we actually finished a day and a half early so we had extra time to perfect our presentation. I also think we did well in terms of communication. We made sure that we all knew what each other was doing/working on so we could continuously be productive and hard-working.

On the other hand, I think we could work on critical thinking and conscientious learner. I think we could improve on critical thinking because when we had set our ideas/solution, we didn't really think about looking at it from different ways, we only thought that we had to make our pamphlet and presentation a specific way, and so we got stuck a few times. In the future, we should be more open-minded about looking at things from different perspectives. For conscientious learner, even though we finished early, we did have some time management problems in the beginning. Before we realized that we had to plan out our time more effectively, we could have worked on our time management and organizations skills so that we hadn't started off behind.

Overall, I think our final product was well done and I am proud of what we accomplished during this project.