Our project is about figuring world problems in a city, specifically San Diego. We did our project to try and help San Diego neighborhoods for the better. The neighborhood that I was focusing on was South City Heights. A group member noticed that City Heights more dependent on cars, instead of biking or public transportation. We thought of ways to solve the problems that we observed and came up with a couple of solutions. Our ideas were adding more bus stops, changing the interior and exterior of the buses, and using autonomous shuttles for residents. During the project we had to think about funding, how it will impact the environment, and how it will impact San Diego. For us to get more advice we listened and talked with urban planners that gave us feed back and ideas on how to solve them. This project was a stressful journey, but at least we now have ways on how we can change our city for the better.
An Interesting Article An article that helped me in my research was an article from BBC named Five of the Most Radical Car-Free City Experiments.It was useful for me because at the moment I was researching related or similar projects. It was about how cities find ways to make certain areas of the city to be car-free starting as an experiment. I found it as a requested article that I was reading before that had similar content. An interesting thing that I read in this article was in Paris, France they only let cetain cars drive for one day and let other cars drive the following day, it helped because pollution went down 30% when they kept on doing this experiment.
Fact Sheet Critiques A product in the project that I did was the fact sheet. In the fact sheet we had to put a plan summary, funding options, research on the enviromental aspect, political support, our timeline when we plan to do our ideas, and related projects. I did most of it, which was hard since it was a lot of information I had to find, but I felt that my final product was a good fact sheet. When I got my first draft fact sheet critiqued by my humanities teacher, Matt; I had a lot of critiques on every section. I think that was good because it got me started on how to make a exhibition ready fact sheet. In my second draft I still had many critiques but a little less than the first time, this time I got the fact sheet critiqued by my spanish teacher, Loredana. She gave me similar critiques, though some where more different. It was my third draft that I fixed the placements of the sections and the grammar where we finally finished it and printed it out. The most common feedback that i got was to put more numbers and statistics and images, instead of paragraphs of research and words.
Project Reflection This project was kind of stressful, since we had a lot of deliverables and had to work in large groups. I believe that I worked hard on my fact sheet, which I am proud of. I feel that I worked very hard and spent most of the project trying to make it exceptional and ready for it to be turned in. I also feel that I collaborated well with my group. We got close and had good conversations with each other, but sometimes when we had to rush a couple of my group members lacked off. I think the project showed me that the world needs a lot of help enviromentally and with transportation. I saw on my research that cars develop a lot of pollution and it would be smarter if we try to limit them. A mastered researching reliable sources and finding relatable articles. I mastered this because we had a index card with website requirements. Finding articles was a difficult thing because some authors wandered off onto a different subject. A soft skill that I learned was to make myself less nervous and to stutter less during the presentation. Before presenting to the urban planners, I felt myself start to shake. I calmed down by breathing in an out and forcing myself to speak loudly.
A look to the future Some things I would change for this project in the future is make the groups smaller, because some people slack off and don't help because they think everyone else in the group will do the work. Another thing I would change is how many deliverables we have to turn in, because some of the deliverables were not being turned in and graded once we were almost done with the project but our group finished them.
A key moment A key moment during the project that I had was when I as stressing aboout the fact sheet, because we had a limited time to finish it. I asked my peers to help me , but they said they don't know how to do photoshop or illustrator. When I talked to Matt about my issue he reassured me and I felt much better. I know working in groups will always be frustrating, but i also know you have to work though it.