PLP has never ending surprises for us. This one was the spring exhibition. The spring exhibition is when the PLP students ask a question then answer it with a product. Usually students would present it at the school to a live audience, people would walk around and there would be food! However we had special circumstances this year because we couldn’t go to the school but that didn’t stop our teachers from planning the craziest project ever! This year we had to ask a question that’s related to covid that would also help reach one of the U.N sustainability goals. This was really challenging because all the goals seem so important and you wish you could help fix all of them but our reality is that we as an individual could only work on one. They all seemed so great but the ones that stuck out to me were 10 (reduced inequalities) and 6 (clean water). In the end our group made a story about detectives who were doing a study on how the virus effected different people. Let me tell you how we got there…….

To answer our question we followed the LAUNCH cycle.

 The first step in the cycle is to Look, listen and learn.  For our first milestone we had to fill out a form that would help us ask or driving question.  Asking a driving question was very hard for me because there was so much we could do but yet there were still limitations. At first my question was about water filtertration but I couldn’t  figure out how to make solve a problem related to COVID. I didn’t end up thinking of my question until after I was put into my group, Economic Inequalities.How might we avoid biased opinions in job interviews?

        The second step was to Ask Tons of Questions. For our second milestone we had to plan it all out and do lots of research. Planning it out was also hard because my question was very open ended. So I then asked tons of question, that was easier since I didn’t know very much about job interviews in the real world.

     The third step was Understanding the Process. 

For this phase we had to plan what we wanted our final product to look like. This was really hard because when I created my question I literally had no idea how I wanted to present it. Ideally we would have been in school so I could’ve done something more interactive but that was out of the question.

   The fourth step was Navigate Ideas.

This phase I enjoyed doing. We were asked to go back and revise all the work we had done. We also had to start looking at all of our projects as a whole. This was difficult because we made the discovery that all of our project were very different.

The fifth phase is Create a Prototype.

In this phase we made a prototype. Our group really struggled with this step because we had to put all of our completely different projects into an exciting story to tell over zoom, it was a challenge to say the least. We actually had to change our whole story 1 hour before the exhibition. By the time exhibition came our whole group was very happy with how our story turned out!!

The last phase is Highlight and Fix.

Here we had to prove that we had failed and grown from it. I had lots of evidence. It really showed me how far I had gone, and how many times your idea can change throughout a project. My group and I failed a lot but in the end I’m glad we did because we were the best COVID detectives any of the audience had ever seen!

See you next year!