Sustainability Project Reflection

 

Project Description

When we were approached with the idea of creating a space/building that is sustainable, I had many questions. “What is sustainability?” “How do you make something sustainable?” ...ect. I was very confused at first at what we were actually doing, I asked some questions, and got some answers. We are making a sustainable structure with a group of interest. We then did a bunch of brainstorming and came up with some amazing ideas.

 

We went on a ton of field trips for inspiration and ideas such as, manna soup kitchen garden, twin buttes farm, a building site, and many more. We also had a ton of guest speakers to help us understand better what a sustainable design is and how to pick a good space to create something in. We went to a ton a greenhouses and learned what type of plants we can grow and how to build a greenhouse.

 

Based on the information we got in this project, and all the research we did, my personal understanding of what sustainability is it something made out of nature, something that could be recycled, or something where you get more out of it than you put in.

 

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Prototype Description

Near the most beginning of the project we did interviews with different people around the school. I interviewed two freshman, one sophomore, one senior, and one teacher. I asked them questions such as, where do you feel the most safe, happy, or comfortable. What do you do out of school, in your free time ...ect. I got a lot of the same answers, feel comfortable and happy and relaxed in nature, like a quiet safe space and being with friends. All those answers help our group aim towards our design.

 

We had tons and tons of opportunities to prototype our ideas and refine them then get into more groups with more of the same interest as you. Making a geodome, like what my group did, wasn’t even close to my first idea. It wasn’t even one of my ideas! I saw that someone else designed it on some paper, loved the idea and joined that group. I had lots of ideas and tons of time to keep growing those ideas.

 

After we were in our geodome group, we decided it was a little to big, and split off into two different groups. Interior and exterior. The exterior group designed and looked for materials to build the actual geodome. The interior group ( I was in the interior group) designed, built, and painted everything that would be inside of the geodome. We also all joined to clean up all our space outside and made a stairway of rocks down to the creek and to the dome. We all also thinned out the space where we were going to build the geodome. The interior group made and painted garden beds, vertical gardens, planters, benches...etc.

 

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Project Reflection

I grew in collaboration the most during this project, because I had to work with a HUGE group, and I usually don’t do very good with a big group. The first few days of the project we were stuck inside of 1 room for 4 hours everyday. That was pretty much only describable as chaos. I actually felt very attacked and not listened to. When we were done prototyping and actually started building, we could go outside and spread out a bit so it wasn't so cramped and we weren’t all yelling at each other.

 

I need to get better at independent research to be the best Project Based Learner I can be. I need to find something in a project that will get me excited about some parts that might not be very exciting to me. I could have done more independent research in this project to research how to make good soil and different things like that.

 

When we started the project and we were almost done with prototyping we knew we wanted to build a geodome, but we had no idea how the heck to do it. We started thanking and researching how to make one, then one of our group members found some premade brackets for a geodome. We all thought that was a good idea, but we had no money. So we started a go fund me page and sent it out and we got $240 in one day. Those were just 2 problems we solved.

 

One problem in this project we were not able to solve was when our brackets were supposed to come on the 7th and will arrive on the 17th, when the project was over. We couldn’t do anything about this problem because they were being shipped, and we couldn’t just go buy some anywhere.

 

My thought of success in the start is almost the same idea of success for the project now. My thought of success at the beginning of the year was to get the geodome and everything built and painted and done by the end of the project. My view of success now would be, that we can actually find the time to build the geodome by the end of the year.

 

Some advice I would give to a student about starting this project next year would just be, pick something to do you are very interested in and will really excite you. And that you will run into lots of problems but you need to overcome them and not give up.