Once again this year I chose to do the elective of Global goals. This is when you choose 1 from the 17 sustainable development goals and try to work towards solving it. Rather than continuing bird boxes from last year, I chose to slightly change it and do micro-bat boxes.

This was because they are a native species of bat, and with their small size they are easy to home in urban areas. On top of that they eat a large quantity of mosquitoes, and with a huge amount of rainfall in the past year, natural methods of controlling these pests was in dire need.

To start off, my new work partner (Jamie) and I sent out lots of emails asking for support and reasurching the topic. They all led to a specalist Joe Tonga (From gobatty.com), who after some convincing, agreed to give us a template box and come out to give us some advice.

We wrote up a set of questions and spent 2 hours talking with Joe which allowed us to gain much exertise for the topic.

After copying the dimensions from Joe’s box, we then modified them so that they had a larger roof to better waterproof the box. We then created a cut-list and used a cut-list-optimiser to figure out exactaly how many boxes we could make. We ordered the materials and then prototyped just 1 box.

We had to problem solve as we didn’t have the correct tool to cut the angle on the sides of the box, but we ended up using a bandsaw and wood-filler

Then we cut and assembled the rest (13 + template box).

After painting and spraying them with a bat logo, we had finished building our 14 boxes.

Jamie, my teacher and I all took one box home to install in our gardens. We donated 5 to the local council for free, and paid 3 to Joe for him to come and install the final 3 on campus.

Overall this was a great success for the end of my Global Goals projects. I learnt and developed my problem solving, teamwork and collaboration skills greatly in this project.

Huge thanks for Ms Rees (My teacher) and Ms Donnelly (My teacher last year), for supporting me throughout my global goals electives.