1. Identify a Need: For this we brainstormed in our group of relevant problems for people our age. A huge one that we came up with was sleep and always being tired. We all were interested and we assumed that much research had been conducted on the topic. We were confident with our choice.
2. Research problem: Next we needed to look into scientific and educational studies conducted around sleep and sleep deprivation. We needed to find reliable sources and we did so by specifying the type of document we were looking for. We looked for government or scholarly articles. As we read through these very long articles we would annotate each paragraph to summarize what was important from each section. Once we had annotated 3 articles each we felt we had enough information to brainstorm solutions.
3. Develop possible solutions: At this stage of developing a solution, no idea is a bad one. This is where we could get creative. We came up with revolutionary bed designs all the way to a sleep serum or sleep candle aroma. Everyone put forth ideas and there was no punishment for outlandish ideas.
4. Select a realistic solution: From all of our solutions we found that education would be the best way to try and blast this problem away or at least reduce the number of people effected. We judged each idea to rate how realistic it was and if it was affordable for four 9th graders. Since we were targeting teens and young adults we needed to make it something that our targeted audience or their families could afford.
5. Construct a prototype: We created a "Got Sleep?" brochure to inform those interested in fixing their bad habits. This brochure included possible solutions, causes of sleep deprivation, the many dangers, and much more information on the topic.
6. Test and Evaluate: We conducted our test by passing our brochures out after an in class presentation. Our feedback was mainly positive, our main complaint had to do with the way our brochure was formatted and folded.
7. Communicate Design: We had our brochure as well as a class presentation to share our finding with just our class. We provided all types of information and we really did raise awareness of this issue, which was our goal.
8. Rework and Improvement: With some easy copy and paste we reformatted our brochure. We also slimmed down our very beefy and long presentation to something just as informational but less attention demanding. (We figured 20 minutes was way too long). We made sure to keep our information but just minimalize the less important aspects of our research.
9. Repeat: we were very confident with our research and the way we approached the solution and we felt for this project we had no reason to repeat these steps.
Personal Reflection: This project was great for me to understand value of sleep. Before learning about it, I figured its just a nice thing, and now i understand that it is much more than that. Not only did I learn about sleep but my sense of time management grew. We made a ghant chart, which is an organizational tool that has you set goals for each day of work. I was always meeting my daily goals and it made me very productive and gave me motivation to stay on task and get my work done. I also really liked how open ended this project this was. We all got to express our creativity and new found knowledge.