Having the opportunity to create a wearable technology that can potentially be part of the solution for such a pressing issue was something rather exciting to accomplish. I think in-depth research and constant brainstorming helped me make a rather thoughtful project, and I believe I’ve grown a lot.

-Class of 2023 Student Seher Y.

Driving Question: How can I create a wearable inspired by the Expo 2020 ‘Opportunity’ theme that solves or draws awareness to a contemporary problem?

Every 40 seconds, someone ends their life. My smartwatch concept has the primary purpose of monitoring the suicidal behavior of the patient while providing a feature of manually alerting selected people about their suicidal state. The watch monitors physical symptoms (e.g. heart rate, breath irregularities, stress, motion tracking) by using sensors to detect suicide risk objectively and rapidly. Out of sight, easy-to-use, and effective.

Getting into the field of robotics with little hardware knowledge was both challenging and exciting. I learned that I can find ways to implement existing knowledge into a new field and that there’s always room to lead my own learning experience if I work hard enough. My biggest takeaway is always approaching any new project with a positive, open, and flexible mindset.

-Class of 2023 Student Bido H.

Driving Question: How can I design and build a robot – inspired by Expo 2020 and the Mobility Pavilion – that performs an action to increase our quality of life?

Our project is an autonomous conservational technology system that aims to provide efficiency in agriculture. NutriBot goes around agricultural fields and senses its surrounding environment to measure moisture levels and the type of nutrients in the soil. It then uses this data to evaluate the minimum quantities of water and nutrients necessary to keep the soil healthy and sprays them in the targeted blocks. Implementing this system will make farmers no longer have to apply water or fertilizers across entire fields. NutriBot can conserve up to 40% of water already wasted in agriculture alongside nutrients due to human error and inefficiency.

Driving Question: How might I build an app that uses music therapy to improve the emotional wellness of teens?

Module Summary: Music therapy is a unique form of rehabilitation that helps people of all ages deal with emotional, physical, and mental ailments by creating and listening to music. For her first TGS mastery project, CM1 Student Yeli K. coded an app that uses music therapy to help teens deal with emotional issues and created a corresponding pitch video to showcase the app.

Student Reflection: “I am doing this project because mental illness has affected so many of my friends and me, and I believe that music therapy is an amazing non-invasive solution for adolescents. This project could bring about true change in our society. Additionally, this project introduced me to advanced coding concepts, which I would eventually like to pursue as a career.” -CM1 Student Yeli K.

Driving Question: How can I have a powerful impact on English and Hindi speakers through a bilingual album?

Project Overview: For his mastery project, Vansh creating a bilingual hip-hop album. The lyrics, sung in English and Hindi, reflected the various personal experiences Vansh has had in his life. In the final tracks, the vocals and the instrumentals sit peacefully beside each other with neither fighting for center stage.

What were your initial goals for this project? How did they change over time?

Initially, I wanted to finish an album within two years, but the more I learned about the process, I realized that being a good singer/instrumentalist was a completely different set of skills than transferring that quality onto a laptop. Because I did everything on my own, musically, I had to produce, arrange, record, play, mix, and master the track all by myself. I also had to learn elements of photography and videography, such as cloning and color grading.

Lastly, for marketing purposes, I also had to teach myself how to run an ad campaign and reach out to people kindly and ask them to listen to your music. I was not familiar with almost all of these processes, and learning all of them – at different levels – made me realize that I had to change my goals. I still ended up making many songs, but I didn’t finish any of them because mid-way through the project, my goal became to release a single before graduation. I definitely think I accomplished said goal.

What are you most proud of?

I’m really proud of the single I ended up creating because it’s a transition to a journey I’ve always wanted to embark on and marks the end of my impactful time here at TGS.

What are the biggest lessons you learned through the process of your mastery project?

I learned how much knowledge there is on the internet and the difference having a supportive community, like TGS, makes when one is pursuing a project of this magnitude.

Driving Question: How can I raise awareness and facilitate alternative solutions to food waste and loss in Mexico?

Project Overview: For her service project, CM2 Student Isa Luna Moro set out to facilitate a circular economy system to reduce food waste inside Queretaro’s food industry. To do so, she worked with local restaurant Moser to improve their sustainability practices and contribute to the circular economy through techniques such as composting and recycling.

Project Reflection: ““My service learning project was a journey of exploration, creativity, and boldness. During this project I decided to go out of my comfort zone and take one of my passions to the next level. I was able to improve my leadership, communication and self-confidence.”

Driving Question: How can I study the psychological impact of video games?

Module Overview: For her project, Zoya focused on psychological research by measuring the emotional and behavioral impact of violent and non-violent video games. Her correlative research looked at how playing video games affects individuals by observing them in their natural environment. The participants reflected on their mood and behavior, and Zoya evaluated this research to arrive at her conclusion.

Project Reflection: “Through this project, I learned that I am quite interested in psychology. Conducting research was exciting; however, reading about existing research and previous studies was also quite fascinating. I learned so much about different research methods, and I made so many mistakes while conducting my research. Learning from my own mistakes, however, makes me confident about conducting more investigations in the future.”

Driving Question: How can I apply my knowledge of emergent behaviors in a visual program to find the most efficient rule sets for species’ environments?

Module Overview: Throughout the course of this project, Seb learned how to program in C# and Java alongside learning how to create a polished simulation of emergent behaviors in species using the Unity 3D-processing software. Emergent behaviors refer to when individual parts come together to work as a whole, in this case, the flocking behavior of birds. 

Seb started by looking at birds as they are the most heavily documented species in emergent behaviors. He gathered data about the best rule sets. Based on this data, he determined which of the birds’ flocking patterns, including separation, alignment, and cohesion, were the most effective. 

Project Reflection: “I learned a lot in all aspects of the product: data synthesis, graphing, programming, and more. The bit I enjoyed most was by far the data analysis, as I got some actual feasible results, all from my computer simulation.”

Driving Question: In what ways can the philosophy of decentralization and blockchain technologies be catalysts for disruption and efficiency within the current modus operations of the business world?

During their Panama term, Che and Scott elected to develop a game that gamifies the backend of Blockchain to simplify and educate users on how blockchain really works.

The game concept they developed is Metaminers, which aims to have users build a blockchain together with their friends. Users add to the chain by playing minigames, receiving rewards for completing entire blocks. Unlocking blocks leads to a chest containing rewardables that can be used to help solve problems easier in the future. As part of their process, Che and Scott spent quite a bit of time developing a wireframe of their product including graphics and other assets, examples of which you can see below. For their smart contract, they chose to mirror the inherent ethics held by founder Satoshi Nakamoto during the creation of Blockchain.

Click the image caption to view their site:

Maria decided to tackle two topics at once: 1) most people have a misunderstanding of economic issues and 2) most game companies are greedy, spamming their “free” products with exclusive content. Their solution was to “create a multiplayer game owned and updated by the players where gamification is used not to make customers spend money, but to solve issues with the economic system.” In their project, the game is owned by the community and the community decides.

Driving Question: How might we collaboratively implement a design-thinking process to meet the needs of the community we serve?

Explanation of Summative

Our summative product is the concept design and layout for an app designed to help households cut back on their domestic food waste by providing them with an interface to better manage the contents of their fridge, their dietary needs, and trips to the grocery store. The app would address some of the main reasons for domestic food waste that we identified – overbuying of food in general and poor storage of it in the house (i.e. forgetting about it in the fridge, letting it exceed its expiry date and having to throw it away, etc).

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

Our primary goal as a team was to learn how to collaborate effectively online, especially when deprived of the intimacy and information exchange of real human contact. Our meetings were casual yet productive, and we made the most of our situation by calling each other frequently in between to compensate for the lost opportunities we would have had if we were physically together. Another of our goals was to learn how to properly conduct interviews with users – we achieved this first by researching the nuances of good and bad interviews and then interviewing members of our families, the TGS community, etc.

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

A large part of our creative process had to do with accommodating various people in our team. This meant scheduling meetings, which included keeping in mind a distance of 7 hours between two of the members’ timezones. In another sense, though, this involved designating roles based on different people’s abilities and expertise, largely to do with technology and software design. Therefore, we learned the importance of using the strengths of the people on our team and assigning them to the areas that they’d be most effective in.

What did this project mean to you?

This project was meaningful in that it brought a group of us students together who didn’t necessarily interact very much outside of school before; it also taught our team much about the real nature of collaboration as something that can be both online and in person.