Reflection

This 20 time project started out as means of educating ourselves and others about the drought mainly by doing just research. That didn't really work out too well. The drought is such a large and general topic that we needed to synthesize our idea into something on a much smaller scale. So we went on the route of researching what our peers are really interested in about the drought. When we put out the survey it helped shaped how we would conduct the rest of our project. The input of the community is really good tool that we discovered during this process. We have yet to utilize the face interview which we said we would do, but ultimately didn't.

It was really hard to keep ourselves on track. Other than the blog post that was due every few weeks, we didn't have any other guidelines or deadlines to keep our goals in line. Vega and I discovered that we could incorporate research, analysis, etc into our blog posts. The posts would encourage us to do something more than just reflect on the little progress we had made. We'd think "oh we have a post coming up we should add something into our project". So thats exactly what we would do. We'd put out a survey for one post on top of reflecting, then the next week we'd analyze it or we'd research and put our information into a presentation. Basically so we could end up having something to talk about. But it did really help! We covered a lot more ground when we were expected to talk about what ground we actually covered.

If we could go back we'd of put out surveys earlier and asked more people in person about the topics they are interested in, it would of guided us on a much more efficient path. We wanted to teach others, but we couldn't really do that if we didn't know what they are and aren't informed about already.

The project really isn't finished, it has just begun. Honestly, we don't know what the future holds for this project, but we hope to continue through our drought endeavors. 

A Little Intro to Factory Farming

Factory farming is a huge consumer of water in California. Between watering the crops that farm animals eat, providing drinking water for billions of animals each year, and cleaning away the filth in factory farms, transport trucks, and slaughterhouses, the animal agriculture industry has a huge impact on the water supply. It also takes an estimated 1,581 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef, which is roughly as much as the average American uses in 100 showers

Putting It All Together

      Last week, we started our presentation! Disclaimer: We wanted to put all our information together in one area (not purely for TED talk). After doing a bunch of research on the drought and gathering the results from our survey, we felt that we had enough information to begin putting something together. We still have some more work to do; we plan on interviewing students so we have more opinions about the drought from the public. By finding out what the majority of the community doesn't know about the drought and its effects, it's easier to figure out what sort of information we need put into our presentation. We don't want to ramble on about topics that people are already familiar with; we want to teach them something new and give them something to take away from our presentation. For example, from the survey we found that most people understand the effects of global warming on the drought so we've been focusing on the effects of agriculture on the drought. The only problem that we've really had is managing time. We haven't necessarily fallen behind schedule but we definitely feel the pressure of the short amount of time we have left to finish our presentation.

Survey Analysis: The Climate Change

Two weeks ago we put out a survey to see how people are using their water and what they believe is causing the drought. Around 22 people replied and we got an array of results. The first question we asked was how long you spend in the shower. 50% of the people spent 10-20 minutes, 31% spent 5 minutes or less, and 18% spent 7 minutes. The 7 minutes was not an option however, we made an extra section for "other responses" and fair amount of people replied, so giving people the option to comment on each question was very informative. The next question pertained to how people conserve their water. Almost all (90%) turn off water while using the sink and around 70% said they do/ would spend less time in the shower & don't water their lawn. For the final question we asked what people think is really causing the drought, and almost all said it was climate change. Today we posted the survey in the junior class Facebook page and we hope to get more responses and analyze the new results in a few weeks. A small setback was getting the word out, but i just checked and in under 10 minutes we got 5 more responses. Hearing others opinions on our survey and seeing how other people think about the drought really helped us get a glance into how are community views the drought (more specifically teens). Also the comments of fellow classmates on our last post helped us get the word out more (since they suggested putting it on fb). They help us see new ways to keep up the progress of our project.

Survey here if you haven't taken it already

SURVEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Our project is off to a good start! A big part of our project is to educate the public on the drought. In order to do that, we decided to find out what the majority of people are doing to save water through an online survey, which you can take here!!! The only setback we've had so far is finding people to talk to about the drought. We've learned that it's hard to get information out there and to make sure that what we're doing is actually making a difference. Our next step is to find people to interview about the drought and what they think is the best way to fix it. We'll be asking people of all ages questions about the cause of the drought, the effects of the drought on our community, and solutions to the drought.

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What is our project?

20 Time is a concept that lets a student or employee use work time to research a topic that they are interested in. 20 Time lets students express themselves by learning more about a subject that they care about and creating a some sort of product relating to what they learned in the end; whether the end product be a new idea that could change the world or simply raise awareness of a problem, 20 Time teaches students how to be more independent in their learning. The essential question that we have asked is "what is the drought?". We hear about it on the news and we’re told to conserve water at home, but what does that really mean? From here more questions popped up: does turning off the tap while we brush our teeth really making a difference in the severe drought? Are we the ones to blame for the lack of water in California, or does the blame fall on the farmers in the valley that are using up gallons upon gallons of water daily? What are ways that we can reduce or even reverse the drought? Why aren’t we using solutions that people have come up with already? All these questions are why we have chosen to make our 20 Time about the drought because it is a topic that both of us are interested in. Our goals are to find out what people think of the drought, learn more about the drought so we can educate ourselves and others about the effects of the drought on our society and agriculture in California, and find and fix possible solutions to the drought. We will measure our progress through this blog by posting weekly about what we have done in relation to our project that week. Moving forward we plan to interview students about their opinions of the drought and then seek the truth about the drought from water conservation officials in California. We will record their responses and put in our experiences into a documentary that we plan to show during our presentation at the end of the semester. We also plan to look into the solutions that are currently being presented for the drought and try to figure out why we haven’t already implemented those solutions in California.(Desalination: one possible solution to drought)