Yet again I have done a Blue Sky project. It is actually crazy to think about but this is the 6th that I have done. This year was basically like any other, I had to come up with a project to do that I could show at a Exhibiton, although this year there were some constraints. This year our teacher wanted us to focus on some development goals based that came from the UN. Of course we weren’t planning on solving world hunger, so we tackled there goals on a smaller, more local scale.
The goal that my group and I were interested in was number 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities. For my project I was in a group as you could do a group project or a project by youself but, a couple of my friends and I crafted an idea together, and we believed that it was enough work to split into 4 people. My group and I decided on improving the public transit system, as we believe that there were areas that could be better. The reason we chose to focus on public transit was becuase in Vancouver, there is a lot of congestion in traffic becuase, the city has a fairly high population for it’s size. That is why the traffic is not very good here, another negative to having that many cars on the road is that it creates a lot of carbon emissions. We believed that if we could get more people out of there cars and into buses it would reduce carbon emissions and congestion. We basically focused on what would make buses more attractive to the average person. In my group of 4, two of us worked on making the buses almost more luxurious kind of like a first class bus. The other to worked on making a better bus route that would be more attainable and useful for most people.
To do this project we have to go through a process, we call this process the L.A.U.N.C.H. Cycle. As you can see, that is an acronym, and that acronym stands for:
L-Look, listen, and learn – Goal: Awareness, seeing a problem and having a sense of empathy
A–Ask tons of questions – Goal: Sparked by curiosity, leads to understanding the process or problem.
U–Understand the problem or process – Goal: Use authentic research experience (interviews, analyzing data, articles, watching videos)
N–Navigate ideas – Goal: Brainstorm, combine, analyze, and navigate ideas to generate a concept for what they might create
C–Create a prototype – Goal: Could be an action, digital work, tangible project, work of art, or event
H–Highlight and fix – Goal: Fix what is failing, for every mistake brings you closer to your final product
Since I have done Blue Sky 6 times now that acronym has been engraved into my brain. That seems like it would also be a long process, but we did it in about two weeks. It was a bit of a shorter of a timeline than last year, so we basically sped the process up a bit more. Most of the project was a mad scramble trying to get everything done on time.
Of course we started with look, listen and learn part of the project which I have already talked about previously in this post. We also asked tons of questions to actually figure what we wanted to do and that was figuring out what are some of the problems in Vancouver, and that was traffic congestion. The next step was to acutally figure out and understand what we had to actually do to complete this project in the short timeline. That is why we decided to split it into two projects for 4 people. All four of us talked for most of a class to figure out what we were going to do, we had man different ideas before we finally settled. We then moved onto creating our first prototype. Our first prototype was just a drawing of what we were going to create. We then moved onto our second prototype which had to be something that was physical. We then for the third prototype had to create our final product but, once we were done that prototype we had to fix and improve it to make it ready for the exhibiton. Now that I’ve told you the process of this project I will now show you what I actually did.
As you can see that is my partner and I’s first prototype. Probably the first thing you notice is that it is a chair. The reason for that is tha my partner and I decided to focus on how to make the inside of a bus more attractive. We decided to focus on the chairs becuase you can change them many ways and they aren’t the best chairs in the world either. We then created another prototype that was a lego model of that. It doesnt really look to much different, but the final product is the prototype where everything came together and we created a pretty solid chair. Another thing to add to our project was that I tried to show all of the negative things about driving and I did that by doing a small write up and creating a chart. Here is that information:
What are the Positives to Not Driving?
The problem at hand that we are focusing on is the amount of congestion and carbon emissions in Vancouver. We believe a lot of that has to do with the fact that once people get their drivers licence, they do not use public transit. These past couple of weeks we have been thinking about what will attract people to use public transit more often. We came up with the idea of making a more luxurious bus. That essentially means creating a “First Class Bus”. We have made it more comfortable by completely changing the bus seats, and adding more room per passenger. There are also some negatives to driving cars, such as you cant multi task, you have to find a parking spot and sometimes pay for one, and every once in a while you might have to deal with road rage.We have also decided that a lot of people would get out of their cars and into buses if they new they were saving money, and I have decided to show you exactly how much money you are saving. To calculate how much it cost to drive, I took into account: insurance, gas, yearly, maintenance, and cost of the car. Some of the things I did not take into account was the cost of accidents, from minor fender benders all the way up to complete write offs.
This was all based on average costs in Canada.
That was my project that I did this year for Blue Sky. I feel that it is probably the best one that I have done yet. I think that has to do with the fact that I was very engaged the entire time I did this project, as this topic was very interesting to me.
