Solve a World Problem
Evidence Of Work:
Our task was to select a world problem from a vast majority of choices and my group with Jackson Young, Noah Albertson, Ibuki and myself chose the topic of political division. We chose this topic because is a very big issue, and we thought it was going to be an interesting challenge. 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 making a bi-partisan news source, so we could look at all the different opinions.
https://sites.google.com/students.nusd.org/joinnews/home
Engineering Design Cycle:
1. Identify Need: We chose our problem in class where Mr. Williams told everyone to write down as many ideas as we could on a shared Google doc and so I was assigned to the category of political division. We figured out that political division has many negative effects such as political violence, democratic backsliding, and unfairness in elections.
2. Research Problem: Over the span of a few days, we annotated articles and discovered a lot of information about political division in the U.S. We figured out which news sources leaned on each side of the spectrum, left or right.
3. Brainstorm Solutions: We came up with many solutions, such as reworking the American government, making a common enemy, and civil war 2, and winner takes all. All these solutions we came up with took too much time or resources and were very unrealistic so we crossed it off the list.
4. Choosing a Solution: We decided to make a bi-partisan news source so we could see other people's opinions and what they wanted to say. We wrote 4 different articles and added a comment section, so people can comment what they think.
5. Developing Prototype: We started off with each one of us making an article about multiple things in the world like the conflict in Hamas and Gaza, and we inserted them to the website
6. Testing & Evaluating: We would test our non-bais website by asking for multiple political perspectives and incorporating them into our website.
7. Improving Prototype: To improve this news source we would find a way to automate the work so it could unbiasedly gather all the information and combine it on one website where you can make your own opinions.
Reflection
I think we did pretty well on this project. We chose a difficult topic, so we thought it was too hard at the beginning, but as we did more research and pushed through it, we completed the project with a good solution. I think I did a good job focusing on my work and not getting distracted. We each wrote an article that required more research, so we needed to work efficiently. One thing I think I need to work on is leadership because we could have worked more efficiently if we worked together rather than independently. We did a really good job in coming up with a good solution and actually making it.