Blue Sky 2018

This is my last blog post of the school year and I’m kind of sad that this year is over, it went by so fast. You probably already know from the title of this post that I’m going to be talking about, 2018 Blue Sky! If you would like to know what previous Blue Sky projects have been like in the past you can click here.

Blue Sky is a project we do twice a year and is a part of our non elective elective Maker. This project is focused on solving a problem someone or a group of people have. In previous years we have just had to pick a topic and answered a question but this time we focused in on a more local problem our community faced.

This year specifically we focused on the LAUNCH Cycle, what is that? Well the LAUNCH Cycle is way to let student innovate and express their creativity.

The launch cycle can be used for any project in any class but it specifically works for PLP as many of our projects are based around a driving question and go through the process of revision and critique. The LAUNCH cycle consists of 6 phases which each one of the letters in LAUNCH stand for including:

L- Listen, look and learn
A- Ask Questions
U- Understanding a problem or process
N- Navigate a s brainstorm ideas
C- Create, make build and design
H- Highlight and Fix

After completing these steps your ready to present and show off your final product to your audience. Throughout this project we used the LAUNCH cycle and this post will show you the steps of my project. However before I explain the process of the project I should probably explain what I ended up creating for Blue Sky. Well as we drew inspiration from the UN sustainable goals I was put into the categories called responsible production and consumption.

To better understand our topic we had to do some research about what responsible production and consumption means. This was kind of the first phase of the LAUNCH cycle as we had to deepen our learning about a curtain topic. A couple of things that stood out to me when researching into the topic was that the UN’s goal is to become more sustainable with our natural resources, reducing the amount of waste. So we decided to dive deeper and fix a local problem our community, Izzy and I decided to try and make Seycove a more eco friendly school. We determined we were going to tackle the issue of paper towel waste at our school specifically in the women’s washroom.

The reduction of paper towel usage at our school wasn’t always our first idea, originally we planned to focus in fast food restaurants and plastic reductions. We were going to split up the plastic usage into four areas cups, packaging, plastic toys and recycling system. Although this was a decent idea for a design plan part of Blue Sky this year was about actually following through with your idea. This would have made it very difficult to get a realistic idea of how our ideas would work as the fast food places wouldn’t just let us implement our ideas. Especially for sanitary reasons as well as we wouldn’t have enough prototypes to give to a fast food restaurant. Overall the entire idea wouldn’t work to execute so we had to go back to the drawing board. This is part of the research stage and it just shows you that not every idea is going to work out perfectly which is ok. It’s part of the learning process and how we become better learners, we have to use our mistakes and our failure to improve and create the best product possible.

The way we found the idea of focusing on reducing paper towel usage was asking around to people which is the second phase of the LAUNCH cycle. We didn’t really know what we were going to focus on and exhibition was in less than a month (just 3 weeks). We decided the best way to come up with a solution was find a problem that we could try to tackle, so we asked some of our friends what some of the biggest issues that they thought our school faced. The first thing they mentioned was that the paper towel bins are always overflowing and there are never enough paper towels in the paper towel dispensers. Many of our friends agreed that this was a big problem that they thought the school faced.

We took this problem then looked at the bigger picture, why were the bins overflowing, what is causing this? We then further our investigated and understanding of the problem, which was the next phases of the LAUNCH cycle. The first thing we did to understand the problem was talk to the janitor about the school’s paper towels usage as well as the problem we were trying to tackle. This was very useful as he showed us an approximate amount of paper towels our school used in week (one case of 6 roles which are each 800 ft), the brand of paper towels and some steps the school has already taken to become more eco friendly. These included the bins that were already put in place which many people said kind of encouraged people to use more paper towel.

Once we better understood the problem in our school we were onto the next phase of the LAUNCH cycle. This included brainstorming and coming up with a solution to the problem which was inexpensive and effective. Our idea was to create a new recycling bin for the women’s washroom that encourages people to use less paper towel. As well as further our knowledge about the cost it would be for our school to invest into a hand dryer. The bin we designed that Izzy sketched on paper53 was designed so that there was an clear front to visibly show how many paper towels we were using. The clear front was in the shape of a tree to be more aesthetically pleasing and relate the paper towels back to the trees that are being cut down to make them. This design was drawn really well, I want to give Izzy credit for the drawing she did a really good job of illustrating what our box was going to look like. While Izzy created the sketch I did research about cost and amount of trees paper towel are using and a comparison to hand dryers.

We then went onto the creation part of the project which was the 5th phase of the LAUNCH cycle. For this part of the project Izzy and I created and built the recycling box we designed. This was actually quite challenging but definitely worth it as I learned many new building skills that I will definitely use in the future. The most challenging part of the creation process was cutting out the tree at the front of the box. We had to do this by outlining where we were going to cut then use a drill to make a hole in the wood then using a jigsaw to cut out the tree. After cutting out all the wood, screwing It together, making sure it was solid and doing a couple final touches to the design. However this actually wasn’t super easy putting the box together as we had to trim and file down edges to make it even.

We painted the box green, as well as created signs to enforce reducing you paper towel usage then we brought it to the school and were ready to use it. We went in at the end of the day filled our box up with the amount of paper towels from that day and measured a line on the box. Then we set a goal for our school to reduce the paper towel usage by 50%. The box was left in the bathroom for one day and we were just under our goal!! We were super happy about this and ready to show it off at exhibition night, this was the final phase of the LAUNCH cycle. After finding a problem, researching, designing, creating, then executing we created a solution to a problem our school faces.

We were almost ready for exhibition night, we just also had to compare and research the amount it would cost to invest in a hand dryer. After doing the research and finding out that it would be more beneficial to the school as it would save money and be more eco friendly. Uisng some of our math skills we learned this year we creating a linear graph to show the cost for paper towels compared to a hand dryer over the course of a school year. We showed all this information on our poster board we created for exhibition night. Our group’s area was themed around Responsible Production and Consumption. This was a little difficult to represent in a room as we were grouped with all the other grades and they all had different projects. After discussing with everyone else in our group then we decided to theme our room around what the world would look like if we were more eco friendly and responsible with waste. We placed a lot of trees around the room along with made a leaf garland and a recycling sign out of recycled paper. I think our room looked really good and we really pulled it together. The food we served was fresh fruit, flavoured water and recycling symbol cookies.

Overall this project has been a really good experience, especially being able to improve upon my time management skills with such little time to do the project. A big thing I’ve learned from this project that has really stuck with me is that you don’t need to create an entirely original idea or think completely outside the box. You can build off of things that already exist making them better and turning it into your own new and improved idea. Also sometimes the ideas Many don’t think will work are the ones that end up succeeding in the long run, think of Apple for example. When the company for first invented many people thought the idea of a computer would never take off and now today Apple is one of the biggest technology companies in the world. This is the last blog post of this school year, and felt I’ve really improved as a learner over the past three terms, until next time!