What is our Creative Engineering Design? The goal of this project was to try to solve a world problem, whether it be a small but significant problem, like zippers, or larger problems like world hunger. This meant there was a lot of freedom with what problem you would solve and how you would go about solving this problem. My group and I chose to try to solve the climate change, or global warming, problem. Global warming is mainly caused by greenhouse gases trapping heat in the atmosphere that is emitted from earth. There are many ways people can contribute to stopping global warming, but we wanted to think of something that is fairly easy to actually do. You could have the crazy idea of completely banning fossil fuels, which would be expensive to find alternative fuel and take a while to put into action. Instead, we decided to plant trees wherever we can, but start a redwood grove by a solar farm in Novato. Trees absorb Co2 and create oxygen, the most abundant greenhouse gas produced by human activity.
Notice: Slideshow is over the limit in megabytes, so I am not able to include it on the page. To summarize, it was just our way of presenting how we would go about completing this.
Content- Engineering Design Cycle
Identify Need: Everyone in the class had thought of a world problem that they wanted to base their project on. Groups were formed with people who had similar or the same problem that they wanted to focus on.
Research Problem: For this step, we were each required to find three sources that had to do with our problem, global warming, and annotate them for information.
Develop Possible Solution: This step allowed us to list many possible solutions to put global warming at bay. They could be any idea, no matter how simple or complex it is.
Select the Most Promising Solution: We narrowed our ideas down to a few logical, yet effective solutions. We decided we were going to plant trees to take Co2 from the air.
Construct a Prototype: We started to plan where we would begin to plant the trees and which trees would work best in that climate. It was decided to start planting in Novato and get people to plant the trees in their backyards. We also decided our tree would be a coast redwood
Test and Evaluate Prototype: We couldn't do much for this step as there is not enough time we have to let people know they should plant redwoods in they're backyard and also have them actually plant the trees.
Communicate Design: After talking to Mr. Williams about the idea, we realized that not everyone would like a tree in their backyard. We started to think of other locations where we could plant a grove.
Redesign: We found a solar farm close to San Marin Drive that has an area of space next to it where we could plant a grove. We found the number of trees we could plant when we found the area in square feet.
Reflection I think I did well on this project. One thing I did well in was leadership. I was the one who came up with the most ideas and when we decided, I did most of the work on figuring out how we would go about doing it. I also thought I did well in keeping the people in my group on task if they were doing other things. Something I could improve on is the fluency of my presenting. Sometimes I stutter and other times I have to look at the screen to often. Another thing I could work on is taking more time to work on something and make it better. At times I would rush through a slide and then look it over to see there were many errors.