This week we worked on practicing our presentation for the forum. Each day in science class we worked on finishing and timing our presentation. Cami talked about the problem, Skyler talked about our solution, and Cate talked about our future steps. On the day of the forum we took a long time setting up table and making sure that everything was in place. During lunch when it was time to present, we had many people come to our booth. We got good and useful feedback and many compliments that could help us improve our product.
Our project at this moment is to hand small spider plants in cars that run on gas and see how much effect this has on the amount of chemicals that are being put into the air and coming into other people's cars. We have a 3D design that is going to be a hook and a basket that hangs up in your car and has the spider plant in the basket. As we said in the last blog, when we tested the amount of carbon dioxide without the spider plant, the levels were at 60, but when we tested it with the spider plant, the levels went down to 51. We think that if you kept the plant in your car and keep it maintained, it would have a great impact on how much carbon dioxide gets into the car and harms the people inside the cars healths.
This week we worked on finalizing on product. We first created a prototype. It was a 3D printed object that the spider plant would grow out of. But, the handles on that prototype were not strong enough. And broke off of the prototype. So, created a new prototype on Wednesday. This second prototype had thicker handles so they wouldn't break. But, this may not be our final prototype because our plant does not fully fit into our model.
This past Friday we started testing our product. We tested the amount of carbon dioxide in a gas running car stuck in traffic. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 60 parts per million. Then, we put the spider plant in the gas running car for a day and a half. After a day and a half we test the amount of carbon dioxide,and the amount of carbon dioxide went from 60 ppm to 51 ppm. And this coming week we are hoping to finish our prototype, our website, and our presentation. Last week, our idea was to put charcoal bamboo into an exhaust pipe. After more research, we discovered that it could be illegal and dangerous to test our idea. After this, We decided to change our idea. We did more research on in car air pollution and discovered that it was very bad for human health. In car air pollution can cause asthma and heart disease. And after even more research, we came up with an idea to create an in car portable air purifier. We discovered that spider plants are great plant purifiers. science gist did a study in this plant. They put the plant in a sealed off room with many chemicals. After less than 24 hours, the plant had purified almost 95 percent of the polluted air. So our new idea is to put a spider plant in a small 3D printed basket. You can hang it on your rear view window or anywhere in the car you want! And while the polluted air comes through your car, the spider plant will clean it.
At the start of our project we had many different ideas we and it took a while for our group to come to an agreement. One of our ideas was to save ugly food. Saving ugly food is an idea that we had where we were going to take the food that tastes the same as ones that look “normal” but look a little different. Farmers will see the products and just throw them away because they think people won't buy the food. If we took the food that looks different and make a farmers market of sorts and sell the food that gets wasted. Another idea we had was to use smell to motivate people to wake up in the morning and exercise. We were going to build an alarm clock that releases a smell that somehow motivates you to get out of bed and excercise. Through research, we chose a problem. The issue we decided to address was cars releasing exhaust causing air pollution, which is terrible for the environment and people's health. We researched a lot more and found that charcoal bamboo is a natural way to filter the chemicals found in car exhaust. Our idea is to make the charcoal bamboo into a grid that can be put onto the tailpipe of a car, to hopefully filter out some of the chemicals before the exhaust reaches the air. We still need to contact car manufacturers to find out if this would damage the car. When we got feedback, it was mostly that we need to contact car manufacturers and the fact that this idea might be hard to accomplish in the weeks that we have to complete this project. Also, we need to have some way to measure the effect that the bamboo is having on the chemicals in the car exhaust.
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