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Health Education Assignment

My Campaign

What were the biggest things you learnt while completing this task?

The most important thing I learned from doing this was the reality of how many teenage drivers are affected by driving under the influence of alcohol. Before the task, I was aware that drunk driving was an issue, but I had no idea how bad it was. I was surprised that these accidents affected such a large number of people, despite the fact that many individuals educate us on this issue. An example of this is the number of 1 in 5 teenagers who get into car crashes were drunk driving. This was quite a revelation for me, and it captured the severity of the situation.

What one piece of advice would you pass on to young drivers above all else? Why?

That you are putting so many people in jeopardy because of one of your poor choices. What I believe teenagers fail to realise when they choose to drink and drive is that they are endangering their own life as well as the lives of those around them. To prevent harmful circumstances, you should always consider before acting, especially when the lives of others are at stake. Instead taking the wheel after drinking, you should take precautions when you believe you have had too much alcohol. Taking an Uber or having another designated driver take you is the best option.

Write down a pledge that you will commit to when you start driving. Why did you pick these things to commit to? How will you stick to these commitments?

I pledge to never drive while I swear I will never drive while inebriated or, that if I have the power to control it, allow anyone else to drive while intoxicated. I decided to do this because it is the most effective approach to keep myself and others in our community safe. I’m hoping to make the roadways a little safer for everyone. If I am inebriated, I will honour my pledge by allowing someone sober to drive me. I intend to maintain this dedication throughout my driving career since it benefits everyone in the long run. 

Engineering Process – Science Challenge

ENGINEERING PROCESS

The engineering process is a process which enables engineers to develop new designs which are beneficial for our world and its needs. The process is a cycle where the steps are repeated as many times as necessary to come up with the best solution. Using this process, we mimicked a real life problem with spaghetti and blu tack to learn about structures we can build to prevent earthquakes in the areas which are prone to them.  

DEFINING OUR PROBLEM  

Our task was to build a structure which is earthquake resistant which would be effective for areas that commonly experience them. We represented the building materials with spaghetti and blu tack. Our challenge was to create a structure which needed to have a minimum height of 60 cm and a maximum base of 30 cm x 30 cm. The structure also had to be under $60 with the cost of the materials. The spaghetti being $1 per 10 cm and the blu tack being $1 per gram. People need a quick and easy structural design which allows limited resources and doesn’t take up too much money. This is why the budget was implemented into our challenge. We wanted to design a building which was able to last 10 seconds of the table shaking. This shaking representing an earthquake in the real-life situation and the results of what happen to our building after the shaking, would tell us if our structure could be a successful design or not.

STEPS TO SOLVING

The first thing we did was brainstorm the different shapes and elements that we could potentially use to build a successful structure. We put our designs on a page together and selected the one which we think would be the best idea to go through with. Though, we knew that this wouldn’t be our final shape because of the next step of research, it was good to start somewhere. The research helped and created a success criteria for our building.

The next step in the process was to research all the different solutions to our problem and how engineers have tackled the problem in the real world. It allowed us to bring all our research together, described how they could be implemented and why they would be successful, and then justified why it was the best solution. When our group gathered our research together, we learnt many different things. Which is a positive point of the engineering process, it allows people to bring their ideas forward and share them to help find the best solution.

We found that domes are the most used and the strongest structural shape to use in buildings. Though, we realized we couldn’t do much with this since we were working with spaghetti and blu tack. Knowing this, we researched further and found that triangles were the best shape to use structurally since they provide support and equal distribution to structures when implemented in designs. We learnt that without the equal distribution of forces on a building we wouldn’t get anywhere near success in our challenge. is the key to a successful structure and that we need to reinforce the corners of buildings since they are the weakest part. These are a few of the pieces of information were what we had to keep in mind for later while we were creating and planning our designs. Another structurally balancing feature that we learnt would be handy in our project was cross braces (the ‘x’ figure) in our building to again, balance the forces and weight of our building.

The third step to the engineering process is design. Designing is the process where you create a plan for what you are going to make to solve the problem. Engineers use this in the real world by using diagrams to represent what their solution is.

We worked together to plan out a structure which we thought met the criteria for a successful structure. Corners with extra blu tack to reinforce them and cross bracing to make our structure durable. It was also well under budget with only a total cost of $42. We were very happy with this design until we got to the actual building part of the process.

Engineers are responsible for maintaining the physical infrastructure that connects our society. They have to create buildings which are built with limited resources, cost efficient and energy efficient.

The building part of the process was the most difficult process for our group. It was where everything started to go downhill. The spaghetti was weak and it did not hold as much weight as we expected. When building, we realized that many things were going wrong. The spaghetti was too thin and weak. Sticking two spaghetti joints together also weakened the build, which we had not thought about when creating our plan. The amount of blue tack around the top corners was also weighing the building down. We also observed that we had a lack of supports in the between the bottom faces of the prism which would cause the building to fall easily. In the end we couldn’t even finish the prototype for the earthquake test because it wouldn’t stand up.

Tough we were gutted this was a good learning area observe where we went wrong and apply the new knowledge, we gained into our second prototype. We were disappointed since we thought that our design met the briefs but we understood our mistakes and it played a significant part in our second trial.

REPEATING THE PROCESS

Repeating the process of engineering again, to design, brainstorm, create and build Our second structure required a structure with a minimum height of 25cm and a maximum base of 30 cm x 30 cm. The structure also had to include a platform which was able to support the weight of a Lego man and make sure he stayed on during the earthquake test.

For our second prototype we created a more abstract design which incorporated doubled up spaghetti at the base of our structure. This enabled for a stronger ground, this was one of the mistakes we had made in our first prototype. We included cross braces in almost every face, consistently spreading the weight of the blu tack and the spaghetti. It included many triangular faces and had a platform for the Lego man to stand on.

When completing the earthquake test our structure had taken zero damage and the Lego managed to stay on the platform. We were extremely pleased about how we had actively taken on the lessons we learnt from the defeat of our first prototype and reflected on it to create a successful design which was within budget.

And the end of the process, we were glad that we had been able to create a structure that solved the problem and met all the criteria for our task.

COLLABORATION

Our group worked well together but there were definitely some things that we could improve on.

The roles each person played included:

Person 1Draft sketch 1
Draft sketch 2
Prototype construction
Budget calculator 1 + 2
PowerPoint creator
MePotential design brainstorming
Prototype construction
Final structure construction
Stile answers and research Photography
Person 2Project research
Final structure construction

Our group could have split the tasks more evenly, this was a bit difficult due to the fact that we had an absent member when going through the process for the first time. The one thing that we did well was compensate for the absence for the person who wasn’t here. What I mean by this is that one of our members who was absent for most of the time while we were creating our first prototype, took the initiative to do most of the building in the second prototype which we really appreciated.

I think that our group was good at presenting data neatly and make sure it was well presented. Everything was engaging to read and look at, including pictures and diagrams to explain our research further. All our data was collected and organised well, so it was easy to find and use.  

I felt that we could have been more persistent throughout the project but especially with our first design, since it failed, we should have been more determined like we did in the second prototype and at least try to build it up with a new design. But instead, we gave in and we couldn’t test our first structure.

I also feel like our group could have managed our time more wisely. The first lessons we had to research we got easily distracted and produced low levels of work. What we did well was reflect upon this and we decided to redo our research since we had realized that we had produced low quality work. We took time to reconstruct it and make sure we found the things that we needed. This did affect the time we had left to do the other parts of the engineering process which is why I think we should work on our time management skills a bit more.

LEARNING

I learnt many things from this task such as how to use the engineering process effectively and how to use teamwork and collaboration effectively and consistently. It also taught me how much planning and effort goes into infrastructure surrounding us, solving problems in our society and how people can actively put scientific research to use to solve ongoing problems. It was a great experience which I learnt a great deal from. I grasped the concepts from this task well and will actively apply into future situations.