Can We Solve Animal Abuse?
Our task was to solve a world problem, and the problem that we decided to focus on was animal abuse. Included below is our presentation on the subject. Our presentation includes the individual basics of what each team member focused on. It also includes the links to both our final project which was a website , and the document that we used to collect our thoughts.
To go about this project, we used the Engineering Design Cycle, which consists of seven main steps.
- 1). Identify Need: Our need was to solve or help solve a world problem, and our world problem that we focused on was animal abuse. There is a lot of animal abuse happening currently, and my group and I decided to do what we could to lessen it.
- 2). Research Problem: Each person researched a different topic under animal abuse. I decided to research the reasons that people abuse animals. My reasoning behind this was that many people think of animal abuse as one category, but there are many things that qualify as animal abuse that people do not account for. Emma researched overall animal abuse. She found out the specific statistics and overall facts. Tanner researched the medical effects of animal abuse. He researched wound infections and all of the things that can happen to an animal that has been abused.
- 3). Develop Possible Solutions: After researching our issue, we began to come up with possible solutions to the problem. We had over 20 possible solutions, ranging from protests to advertisements. We had many extreme ideas, so we made a shared document and organized our ideas.
- 4). Select most promising: Our final solution was to educate children about animal abuse so that that it happens less in future generations. We decided to educate children through a website that we decided to send to 5th and 6th grade teachers.
- 5). Construct a Prototype: After selecting our best solution, we spent a few days working on a website that was shared with the three of us. We each assigned ourselves a page in the website according to the research that we did. These couple of days were very independent because we were each doing our own section and page.
- 6). Test and Evaluate Prototype: Once each of us had done our separate sections, we all read the other sections and discussed as a team to construct and edit our website.
- 7). Communicate Design: To communicate our design, we sent the website to teachers of the grades 5 and 6. This way, the kids that will receive the link will still be young enough to learn and be imprinted by what they see, but they will also be old enough to understand that it is a serious topic to be talking about.
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Our Solution: A Website
Here is the link to our website:
letsendanimalabusenow.weebly.com
Below is the shared document that we used to stay organized during this project. It includes a Gantt chart, which helped to organize our time, our summaries for annotations, which helped us organize our ideas, and much more.
Here is the link to our website:
letsendanimalabusenow.weebly.com
Below is the shared document that we used to stay organized during this project. It includes a Gantt chart, which helped to organize our time, our summaries for annotations, which helped us organize our ideas, and much more.
Summary:
This project went quite differently than the others throughout this year. In the other projects, we usually made a physical object that functioned for one reason that was relatively small. In this project, the final product that we made was electronic, and it touched on a subject that is very broad and serious. I liked doing this a lot because it made me feel like I was making a difference while I was also engineering.
We had many bumps in the road for this project. To begin with, we had a big group of five people, all with different focuses on our idea. Two of them broke off from the group due to differences on their idea of a world problem. Then we were left with three people. Two of us wanted to focus on animal abuse, and the other on medical issues. We eventually learned to incorporate both into our project. In the end, we had each one of us focus on a different topic under the main umbrella of animal abuse.
Throughout this project, I improved on many things. The main things that I flourished on were time management and staying organized. I did this by creating the shared Google document where all of the team members could go to organize their ideas. We did our best to keep the document neat and organized. I included the document above for reference. We also used a Gantt chart to manage our time. Compared to other projects, I felt the most organized in this one and felt we had more evenly spaced timing.
The main thing that I need to work on for myself was team collaboration. A lot of this project was individual, so my team and I didn't work together as much as in other projects. Other than that, I really enjoyed this project and cannot wait for the next.
This project went quite differently than the others throughout this year. In the other projects, we usually made a physical object that functioned for one reason that was relatively small. In this project, the final product that we made was electronic, and it touched on a subject that is very broad and serious. I liked doing this a lot because it made me feel like I was making a difference while I was also engineering.
We had many bumps in the road for this project. To begin with, we had a big group of five people, all with different focuses on our idea. Two of them broke off from the group due to differences on their idea of a world problem. Then we were left with three people. Two of us wanted to focus on animal abuse, and the other on medical issues. We eventually learned to incorporate both into our project. In the end, we had each one of us focus on a different topic under the main umbrella of animal abuse.
Throughout this project, I improved on many things. The main things that I flourished on were time management and staying organized. I did this by creating the shared Google document where all of the team members could go to organize their ideas. We did our best to keep the document neat and organized. I included the document above for reference. We also used a Gantt chart to manage our time. Compared to other projects, I felt the most organized in this one and felt we had more evenly spaced timing.
The main thing that I need to work on for myself was team collaboration. A lot of this project was individual, so my team and I didn't work together as much as in other projects. Other than that, I really enjoyed this project and cannot wait for the next.