Project DescripionThis project was unique, and sparked curiosity in areas I didn't think twice about in the past. The premise of our project was to pick a problem with a part of the world and come up with a creative way to fix it. Since we live in California, and we wanted to help where we lived, we chose as our issue, the California drought. We did not how to face such a big issue coming in so we made a large brainstorming list with small and big ideas that could help lessen water usage. You can see the list on the right. Then, we targeted two options that were feasible for a high school group of four people to do within a time span of two weeks. The idea we chose to put into action was to make a no- wash shampoo along with a no-wash body cleaner. Unfortunately, as we looked into the ingredients involved in making the body wash, we saw that we can not acquire a portion of them, so we switched our focus onto the shampoo. After constructing a working dry shampoo, we tested it, labeled it and made a slideshow for the class. If every person in California used our shampoo and showered for less time, we would gain back the water lost in only 50 years.
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Solution Brainstorm
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Our Presentation
Concepts
This project mostly involved engineering and creativity as opposed to physics and the concepts behind it. We did not use any formulas or concepts from physics, so unfortunately this section is empty. This is our research:
Reflection
This project showed that engineering doesn't just involve building a complex machine, but involves deep thinking and collaboration. I now fully understand the basics of engineering (research, construct prototype, etc.), and have experience using it, so for the future I can divide my work more diligently. This project for me was a complete success, but still managed to have multiple downfalls. We came up with a working solution, but because of a time crunch and distracted teammates, we could not do something that has a bigger impact on the drought. I liked the project in general, but wished that in return for all the research we did, we could have a better result. We did do well on a variety of aspects in our project. For example, we worked hard when we needed to. In the first two days, we made about eight pages of notes. This helped us complete our project more easily. Another thing is that we all worked together pretty well because we are friends and this helped us when we needed to get things done or give feedback. There were three main issues we came across while working on this project. The first pit is time, we only had two weeks to research make a presentation and make a working prototype, so we could not do most things on our brainstorming list. The second issue is distractions, many times we got distracted for large amounts of time that we could have used to be productive. The third issue was research, we found many websites, but most of which were not credible, this lead to time being wasted reading fake information. These issues made this project tough, but in the end it worked out and we were able to succeed. I hope for the next project, I will have a group that is focused and not distracting.