Water We Doing?
Project Description
This whole project was based on water and the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge. The Siemens challenge is a kind of contest that lets students around the world (I believe) to put in their experiments/projects and how what they’ve discovered and their solutions or effects on the world. This allows you to gain a lot of awareness for your project and what you’re trying to get across. We were all placed into groups of 4, each group had to have an experiment and would end up with a panel for exhibition. My group and I chose “Drugs Down the Drain”, which is basically the effect of pharmaceutical drugs going down the drains and into our oceans. We found that it was a fairly new concept and that it wasn’t fully investigated yet, we only saw that the effects were getting worse with time; fishes were changing sex and underwater life was deteriorating slowly but surely. I learned a lot more than I thought with a project that was pretty much all about water. There were things that I learned about actual water and its properties or structure, to big companies and their distribution of products. We worked as little scientists and work with water tests and learned what every test did and which ones we needed for specific things. We were taught the proper way to research and to compile it in humanities. I personally learned to be more organized in my research because I usually write anything I see and kind of piece it together. In chemistry we learned a lot about how water is affected and the many things that can chemically happen to water whether it’s about it being cleaned or transferred or polluted. For my group project we started off with research to determine our experiment, then found out how we could show the effects of pharmaceuticals down the drain. At first we were planning to show the effects on fish but then realized we weren’t aloud because fish are alive and have right as well. We chose plants instead. We tested waters from around our local Chula Vista area to compare test levels later with the results of our polluted waters. We tested for pH levels and dissolved oxygen levels. For our “pollution” we used medications, which were Ibuprofen, Advil, Walgreens Nighttime cold & flu relief, and Nyquil. We had 4 plants that were the exact same, donated by Petco. We added medication to 3 out of the 4 leaving one of the plants to be our control variable. We observe for about a week and kept testing during that week as well. After the week was over we worked on putting it into words on the application itself and did more than a few drafts, over and over we got different groups to help us revise our whole application until we were satisfied with the product on that Sunday that we were aloud to turn it in early. We ended up with a beautiful and well-organized project and a very professionally written application. I was more than happy with our outcome and even though we have ups and down within our project and panel we overcame them all and were very proud of our work and all our teammates’ work around us.
This whole project was based on water and the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge. The Siemens challenge is a kind of contest that lets students around the world (I believe) to put in their experiments/projects and how what they’ve discovered and their solutions or effects on the world. This allows you to gain a lot of awareness for your project and what you’re trying to get across. We were all placed into groups of 4, each group had to have an experiment and would end up with a panel for exhibition. My group and I chose “Drugs Down the Drain”, which is basically the effect of pharmaceutical drugs going down the drains and into our oceans. We found that it was a fairly new concept and that it wasn’t fully investigated yet, we only saw that the effects were getting worse with time; fishes were changing sex and underwater life was deteriorating slowly but surely. I learned a lot more than I thought with a project that was pretty much all about water. There were things that I learned about actual water and its properties or structure, to big companies and their distribution of products. We worked as little scientists and work with water tests and learned what every test did and which ones we needed for specific things. We were taught the proper way to research and to compile it in humanities. I personally learned to be more organized in my research because I usually write anything I see and kind of piece it together. In chemistry we learned a lot about how water is affected and the many things that can chemically happen to water whether it’s about it being cleaned or transferred or polluted. For my group project we started off with research to determine our experiment, then found out how we could show the effects of pharmaceuticals down the drain. At first we were planning to show the effects on fish but then realized we weren’t aloud because fish are alive and have right as well. We chose plants instead. We tested waters from around our local Chula Vista area to compare test levels later with the results of our polluted waters. We tested for pH levels and dissolved oxygen levels. For our “pollution” we used medications, which were Ibuprofen, Advil, Walgreens Nighttime cold & flu relief, and Nyquil. We had 4 plants that were the exact same, donated by Petco. We added medication to 3 out of the 4 leaving one of the plants to be our control variable. We observe for about a week and kept testing during that week as well. After the week was over we worked on putting it into words on the application itself and did more than a few drafts, over and over we got different groups to help us revise our whole application until we were satisfied with the product on that Sunday that we were aloud to turn it in early. We ended up with a beautiful and well-organized project and a very professionally written application. I was more than happy with our outcome and even though we have ups and down within our project and panel we overcame them all and were very proud of our work and all our teammates’ work around us.
Artifacts:
Final Application:
Group Picture:
Project Reflection:
During this project I learned a lot about the contents of the project itself but more about myself and the people around me. I’ve never had much problems working in a group because I take it upon myself to help my peers and try to do the best I can to make most things work. I do know that I am quite of a perfectionist and I try to get things done my way, it’s not always the best quality but I have gotten better at listening to others. This project in specific was a very good example of this as one of my group members was the same way as me. This helped me realize that when I let people actually help me and speak up in our work that everything becomes much easier and flows a lot smoother. Also, I came to a realization it’s very hard to get into a project with a bad mentality about it. I started off this project kind of half-in half-out because it’s water? What can be interesting about it? Well I started being open-minded about the project around half way through and realized that if I were to at least pretend that it was interesting to me or find small “fun facts” thats it’ll make it all that easier to finish.
The physical document I’m the most proud of is obviously my panel as a whole because if I look at it I can go through the whole project again and remember everything that happened during the project. The fact that it came fully together approximately 2 days before our exhibition day is what makes it even better to look at. Even though I really loved its outcome I can say that my personal growth throughout this project, with opening up to new people and letting others be there to help me and just really getting involved with my team, was huge for me. Last year I had an amazing team and everyone was very much close and open and towards the end of the year most of my best friends weren’t even at school anymore. I was scared to get attached to this team but I honestly feel that this team has made me grow in so many ways and I’m grateful for everyone and all their different impacts on me so far.
I honestly loved the idea of applying for the Siemens Challenge because knowing how many people would enter and what we could potentially do with the money/acknowledgement that come with it. Even though I knew it was going to be very hard and my group made the mistake of formatting it wrong and then having to reformat the whole thing after we thought we were finally done.
I think the final exhibition went very well, I had many parents tell me it was the best that they’d seen, “especially for sophomores” was an actual quote I remember. Everyone was where they needed to be and I think all students handled their stations and schedules very well. With our Spanish exhibition being at the same time and having the schedules was a huge weight on our shoulders but in the end I feel that our team was very much responsible and basically took the schedule into our own hands and figured out when and where we were going to be. After exhibition it was a huge relief and not only that but seeing how everyone seemed so happy with the end result and the fact that we all really did work together to make it that way was even better.
The physical document I’m the most proud of is obviously my panel as a whole because if I look at it I can go through the whole project again and remember everything that happened during the project. The fact that it came fully together approximately 2 days before our exhibition day is what makes it even better to look at. Even though I really loved its outcome I can say that my personal growth throughout this project, with opening up to new people and letting others be there to help me and just really getting involved with my team, was huge for me. Last year I had an amazing team and everyone was very much close and open and towards the end of the year most of my best friends weren’t even at school anymore. I was scared to get attached to this team but I honestly feel that this team has made me grow in so many ways and I’m grateful for everyone and all their different impacts on me so far.
I honestly loved the idea of applying for the Siemens Challenge because knowing how many people would enter and what we could potentially do with the money/acknowledgement that come with it. Even though I knew it was going to be very hard and my group made the mistake of formatting it wrong and then having to reformat the whole thing after we thought we were finally done.
I think the final exhibition went very well, I had many parents tell me it was the best that they’d seen, “especially for sophomores” was an actual quote I remember. Everyone was where they needed to be and I think all students handled their stations and schedules very well. With our Spanish exhibition being at the same time and having the schedules was a huge weight on our shoulders but in the end I feel that our team was very much responsible and basically took the schedule into our own hands and figured out when and where we were going to be. After exhibition it was a huge relief and not only that but seeing how everyone seemed so happy with the end result and the fact that we all really did work together to make it that way was even better.