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.
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.
October 8, 2020 by Effie H., Rachel C., Sarah R., and Teddy F.
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.
Driving Question: How might we collaboratively implement a design-thinking process to meet the needs of the community we serve?
What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?
Our goal for this module was to find a solution to help teens in online school keep in contact with their friends. We wanted our final product to be easily implementable and useable. We achieved our goal by following the steps design process and consulting students in our community.
What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?
As a group, we learned the importance of hybrid brainstorming in collaboration. It allowed us to connect different ideas when problem solving to create a better overall product.
What did this project mean to you?
This project is important for us because we made something to positively impact our community in these difficult times.
Driving Question: How might we collaboratively implement a design-thinking process to meet the needs of the community we serve?
Who was your target audience? Why?
Our target audience was the TGS community. We saw the impact that going online had on the community’s morale. Since there were not as many opportunities to connect with one another, so we decided to create such an opportunity.
What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?
We aimed to give an opportunity to the TGS community to connect with each other in a way that is fun and comfortable. We did this by hosting an open-ended discussion about controversial topics.
What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?
Each one of us learned something different about ourselves.
What did this project mean to you?
This project gave us an opportunity to form more connections within the community. It was also our first time collaborating with people we hadn’t before, so this project also allow us to form bonds within our summative group.
What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?
I wanted to create an epic song with the help of my friend, who is a singer. I achieved them by collaborating with my friend and his dad and learning how to use GarageBand. I made three different songs, but the last one is the actual song, the first 2 were practices. Currently, the song is still a work in progress, so I will aim to showcase it in the future.
What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?
I learned that I could be creative with music and work well on a small team. Before, I thought I was not good at music production, but with this term, I became good at it. Also, my collaboration skills increased as well. I managed to get in contact with my friend and his dad and created a plan to record the song without me being there in person.
Driving Question: How might I grow my creativity during the COVID-19 crisis through exploring the science of creativity and innovation and experimenting with art?
What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?
My goal for this module was to draw more of these circular ornaments, but as time passed, it changed to learning and working comfortably with Photoshop. I did achieve that goal by watching YouTube videos and learning some aspects of Photoshop and applying them to solve different issues that I faced over the course of six weeks.
What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?
As mentioned, I learned Adobe Photoshop from scratch, but for my process, I learned that I often get attached to my ideas, and that tends to limit my creativity. But with this creation, I challenged myself and tried switching my process up. I came up with a list of ideas before I started working on any of them, and that was a very different experience for me.
