This hydroponics workshop was a very fun and enjoyable new experience for me. I had never learned or done anything remotely close to hydroponics, so this workshop was something very new for me. 

When we began our workshop, I was excited to create a hydroponic farm, and I thought it would be pretty easy from the diagrams and pictures. I believed a hydroponic farm was very one dimensional and would be very simple to build, but as we started our project we instantly faced challenges. We first ran into problems with the drainage pipe. The drainage pipe was in the wrong position to drain the water. My team and I spent at least a day working together on this challenge and eventually we did get past this hurdle. We thought this was the end of our troubles, but we just kept running into problems, like the main pipe being too small so we had to rebuild everything. Another problem was our team relying way too much on glue, which leads our entire design to fall apart, wasting hours of our time. We saw problems with drilling holes on the reservoir cap, making us approach the original design completely differently.

Our solutions to our challenges were mainly just modifying our original design slightly. Our drainage pipe was originally a PVC pipe, but we swapped it out with two plastic tubes because it was easier to stick into the main pipe. The biggest problem we faced was using way too much glue and sealant, but we fixed this by lowering the number of leaks and holes. Many times we just scrapped an entire idea we were working on just because it wasn’t working correctly. Every time this happened, we would all brainstorm to make a better version.

My team, Colin, Maddie, Nils, and Reece worked amazingly together. Although we could have done somethings differently. We always had an aspect of teamwork whenever we were building together. Like when we were drilling holes, one person would hold the pipe down, while the other would slowly use the drill. I would say I created and fixed many of the problems and thought of ideas to go around each challenge, but wasn’t so working heavy than my other teammates. All of our traits complemented each other so we worked very great together. Even though we worked well with each other, we could have improved on our communication as sometimes a teammate or two wouldn’t know what was happening. We could have talked as a team and not so much as person to person, this way everyone was on the same page.

If we had more time I would have created a much better stand for our main pipe. Even though our stand works fine, it does not look so aesthetically pleasing. I would make a wooden stand that surrounds the hydroponic farm, making it look much better. If we had more time, I would also re-create our main pipe, as the hole carrying the plants are not even. Since our main pipe isn’t even, it caused some leakage when testing our farm, which could happen again,

Before this foundry week, I did not know what really hydroponics was, but I on the first day we were introduced to the topic by someone who studies it (his name was Walter). After the workshop at the foundry, I had an idea of what hydroponics was, and I had worked hard on creating a hydroponics system myself. We were willing to choose different options for different models for hydroponic systems. Our group chose the DFT system (DFT = Deep Flow Technology), and we presented a diagram of the model in front of the rest of grade 8. After this, we were given materials such as tubes, pipes, seal, many other tools, and way more. It was fairly simple, but we faced some challenges. Firstly, we had to glue one of the pipes, but we used seal dryer which took too long to dry, so we put on a second layer, which consisted of glue. This didn’t work either so we glued on another layer which also consisted of glue. This did not work and the pipe was loosely glued on. We solved this by taking off the pipe and doing it all over again. This time we made sure to glue it on with only one layer of glue, and it worked better. We learnt putting the seal on first was a bad idea. Another mistake was cutting the hole too large when making space for the tubes in order to transport water from the reservoir into the space for the plants. The hole was too big, so when we put in the tubes there was leftover space, meaning when we activated the machine, it would leak through that space. We also solved that by covering it with seal. However, it took 24 hours to dry so we waited. When the seal had dried, we had officially finished the project.