Solve a World Problem

The project:

In this project students got to choose a group that had the same passion about a world problem they wanted to fix, or improve. My group chose to focus on Foster Care. Foster care is a system in which a child is put in a place to stay due to their parents or guardians not being able to care enough for them. My group and I know that this would be a tough challenge to fix, so as our way of solving it we proposed an idea. Yes, foster care is an advanced and professional system, but no matter how amazing the care is for these children, they sometimes still remain unhappy, and many foster children have mental illnesses. We wanted to improve this problem, by enforcing stricter laws, and making a weekly assessment that the foster kids would have to take that would determine how the child is doing and will always ensure that the child is safe. We made made this assessment through google forms, and we couldn't be more happy with the result and that it would provide help for foster children, if they used our solution in the system. And during this project we used the engineer design cycle to create our solutions, and prototypes for our solutions.

The Engineer Design Cycle:

1. "Identify Need" -- For step one, my group and I were discussing the flaws in the foster care system and decided we did need to do some research first. Doing this we saw that , many children in foster care have mental illnesses and from there we really wanted to focus on the foster children's physical and mental health, and improving the foster care system.

2. "Research the Problem" -- For step two, my group and I did more research on foster care and each found up to three or more useful websites for our project. These websites included current laws on foster care, the psychological effects it has on children, general facts about foster care, and the physical well being of these children.

3. "Develop possible Solution" -- For step three, after the research my group and I did we needed to come up with solutions for our world problem. And brainstorming was a bit hard knowing that we needed to design a prototype for this problem later in the design cycle. Originally we wanted to enforce stricter laws, which would be extremely hard to do, and conduct a prototype for. But we still kept the idea, and later came up with making a weekly assessment for case workers.

4. "Select a promising Solution" -- For step four, we ended up using both the idea of enforcing stricter laws and making a weekly assessment for case workers. The weekly assessment would be mandatory for each child to take so that their individual physical and mental health can be a priority and it can alert case workers if there's a problem, and can also ensure safety for the children.

5. "Construct a Prototype" -- For step five, we knew that we couldn't construct a real prototype for a strict law, but we knew that we could make a weekly assessment. We did make law proposals, but for our prototype we made a weekly assessment through google forms. And it asked a variety of questions related to both mental and physical health.

6. "Test & Evaluate the Prototype" -- For step six, we thought our overall project could use more research and we needed to shorten the amount of words in our slideshow presentation so that it wouldn't be too distracting to the audience. But overall we thought our prototype was pretty good, it just needed a few more questions.

7. "Communicate the Design" -- For step seven, we talked more about our prototype and the changes we needed to make to it. We also discussed the changes we should make to our presentation.

8. "Redesign" -- For step eight, we added more questions to our weekly assessment. And we edited our presentation to be more factual and shorter.

9. "Repeat" -- For step nine, we repeated this process a few times throughout the project when we got stumped on solutions and our prototype ideas and so went back to repeat past steps.

Reflection:

In this project I had a fun time working on it, and it went really well during our groups presentation, I also had a very productive group. Two things I learned about myself was, that I work really productively and have good time management, especially because I knew my project topic well. Two things that I need to work on is taking the leadership role more, and contributing even more work. And during this project I used 3 of the 6 C's very well, collaboration, critical thinking, and conscientious learner. I worked with my group, thought of possible solutions, and was good at time managing. One C that I may need to work on and practice more is communication. Although my presentation went well, I wish I had talked more, and I didn't practice the presentation enough with my group which made public speaking a bit harder for me. But, overall I had a lot of fun doing this project with my group.