This Year's Charity Fair: Project Blog

Tri-fold of our project

Summary

During this project, I learned a lot. One thing that definitely stuck out to me in this project is learning how to use laminate on boards and cards. I needed to learn how to use this because without knowing how to we wouldn't be able to make our product look as professional. I also learned how to make a background that players can follow in order to make our board game functional. It taught me alot about graphic design and how the brain processes patterns and paths according to color coordination. This is what I learned over the course of this project

Backwards Looking - What process did you go through to produce this piece?

To create our board game, we went through a relatively simple process. To create all the different parts of the project is another story, so i'm just going to say how we made the game. First, we had to do all of the printing for the boards and cards. Next, we had to cut all the cards to size and laminate them. For the board, we had to cut all the boards to size and cut cardboard to match the background. We then glued the background to the cardboard and laminated it. Then, we laminated all the logos to the back of the text side of the cards. After all that, we put the cards, boards, marbles, rules, and dice into a box. After this we were done creating our product. 

Inwards Looking - How do you feel about this piece of work? What parts of it do you particularly like? Dislike? Why? What did/do you enjoy about this piece or work?

I feel as if our group did pretty well on this project. We produced a well done ignite presentation, as well as we were able to maintain clear ideas throughout the whole presentation. We also did pretty well on our products. However, some things that I thought we did OK on (not very good, or bad) is probably our tri-fold. Our tri-fold looked overall a bit sloppy, and kind or messy in my opinion, but it wasn't overwhelmingly terrible. This what I enjoyed, and didn't enjoy about our project

Outward Looking - What grade would you give it? Why?

I would probably give this project an A-. I would say this because, for the most part, we did everything relatively well. Our presentation was pretty good. Our product was very nice looking and presentable as a legitimate board game. Last but not least, our instructable was pretty good too. The only reason why I wouldn't give us an A is because, like I said before, our poster board had some faults. But they weren't overwhelming, as in they didn't distract you from the ideas our poster was conveying. This is the grade I would giver our project.

Forward Looking - As you look at this piece, what's one thing that you would like to try to improve upon?

I think that I could probably improve upon the tri-fold. As I mentioned before, the tri-fold was a bit sloppy, and overall could have probably improved. So next time I will know what I did wrong before, which was deciding to put the entire covering of paper at once, which can induce tears due to stretching. I think that we also could have made the rules a bit more specific, and potentially made our product look a bit nicer and more profesional. These are the things I will improve upon for my next project.

Should We Bring Back Extinct Species? - WAC

Almost everyone knows of the tales told of the animals in the past. Where animals such as monstrous Dinosaurs, mammoths, and Tasmanian tigers roamed the earth. Well, modern science has given opportunity to bring back these species from the past. Even though Dinosaurs aren't as likely to happen, there are still possibilities of bringing back those that have become extinct more recently. Modern science has proven to have the prowess of reviving these extinct species. Controversy regarding the subject has stirred among the community of those interested in the discussion, and is shown that not everyone is on board with this idea. This is because reviving these extinct species could take a lot of time, effort, and money that could very well be spent on a failed project. I am in the group of people that isn't supporting the concept of De-Extinction, and I will address all of my arguments separately in this essay.

The first argument I have against de-extinction is the complications that bring these animals back would cause. Let's say that we were to successfully bring back one of these species, where would they even go? what would they eat for food, and if they did find a source of food, would those species die out as well? Similar questions to these were also asked in the SENCER article "Should We Bring Back Extinct Species". A quote that supported my ideas from this article was "We don’t know the environmental impacts of bringing back extinct species. Would they be invasive? If there weren’t predators for this species, it could become overpopulated. Alternatively, it could become a “new” predator and wipe out other species". Another concern to this topic is if these species that are brought back would even be protected or not. This was mentioned in the KQED article "Reawakening Extinct Species". This was seen in the quote "There are significant practical, ethical, and legal questions yet to be worked out, such as whether de-extincted species would be protected by the Endangered Species Act or would find sufficient habitat in which to thrive." This is the first reason why I believe that de-extinction could be problematic to today's environments.

The next argument I have against this topic is the fact that all these resource might be inevitably useless and end in a failed project. These species that are already extinct are probably meant to stay extinct and I only say this because the initial purpose of them becoming extinct may very well be the cause of them becoming extinct again. These species coming back also may be at the cost of several other species. This can be seen in the article "We Might Soon Resurrect Extinct Species. Is It Worth the Cost?" from the New York times. In this article, Dr. Bennet gave his thoughts on the topic. “If you have the millions of dollars it would take to resurrect a species and choose to do that, you are making an ethical decision to bring one species back and let several others go extinct,” Dr. Bennett said. “It would be one step forward, and three to eight steps back.” This attempts have been done before and were almost successful, but not quite there every time. An example of this would be in 1989, when there was a species of mountain goat that was going extinct. Scientists were able to collect and gather samples of the very few animals left and attempt to "clone" them. This resulted in several unsuccessful procedures, but a spark of hope came when they were able to finally deliver one of the baby goats. This goat was born in 2003, but died after a few minutes from a lung deformity. This caused millions of dollars in resources to go down the drain.

Even though they were unsuccessful in cloning the animal, the research did end up making several breakthroughs that could potentially help other animals. This proves that this research could be beneficial to other things, but would be wasted if used on de-extinction. There are tons of animals that are on the brink of extinction and could be saved using this revolutionary research and technology. This can be seen in the quote from the SENCER article in the quote “[This technology] could be used to help populate species that are currently endangered, or to diversify the gene pool of species with little genetic variation, leaving populations less susceptible to viruses, bacterial infections and disease". This is why I believe that the research backing de-extinction should be used for something that could be worth our time and money, and could be very possible if done in the right hands.

In conclusions, de-extinction is something that would be not desirable for the following reasons. The resources, time, and money that would be spent trying to make de-extinction a reality, will most probably be wasted on a failed project, or result in the species not having any place to go. De-extinction would also bring up a lot of problematic situations for today's ecosystems and environments. Finally, even though de-extinction isnt the best idea, the research being put on bringing back these species, could most certainly result in saving several species that are endangered because of our damage to their homes. This is why I believe that de-extinction isn't a good idea.

Learning About De-Extinction - Weekly Blog #12

www.sciencenews.org

Summary

This week in science, I learned about the research done on extinct species, and the attempts of bringing them back. I found a lot of things very interesting regarding the resurrection of extinct species.They  talked about how we morally feel obligated to bring these species that we did wrong to, but controversy has spurred among everyone about this topic. Bringing back these species would also take a lot of resources and time to make a reality. There are several engineers working in the field that have been making several developments in this field and that at the end, the benefits would most certainly out weigh the costs. This whole concept of bringing back these extinct special definitely has a lot of controversy, but also has a lot of thoughts coming from both sides of the argument. There are most definitely benefits and disadvantages to both sides of the argument, and just hearing people discuss the topic taught me a lot about different things that have to do with resurrecting extinct species. 

S&EP - Arguing From Evidence

I used evidence to defend my explanation. I answered Riccardo when he tried to claim that one of the articles from KQED learn Investigation was informational. I was able to disprove him by providing  quotes from the specifically explained key concepts in science that are being used today to bring back extinct animals. I was able to successfully rebuttal his claim, and explain using evidence from the text in response to the comment made on his source.

XCC - Stability and Change

This week in science, I was able to identify the stability and change that bringing back these extinct species would cause. The stability that could potentially be brought if Woolly Mammoths were to come back is to help reduce the amount of carbon being released into the air through melting. They were going to bring back the Woolly mammoth by splicing the DNA of the mammoth into the Asian Elephant. Through reading the articles, I learned that bringing back these mammoths would be at the cost of today's Asian elephant population. Through this, I identified change in the population of Asian elephants becoming Woolly Mammoths, could provide stability in the ecosystem, but could also change life in the tundra and the population of the elephants drastically.

Our Product's Carbon Footprint - Weekly Blog #11

Summary

This week in science, I learned about the affects that modes of transportation have on the environment. When materials for products try to get from one place to another, they have serious affects on the air quality. With every shipment comes a price, and not only the price you pay for the product, but also a price of kg of carbon released in the air through gas emissions. We had to calculate how much kg of carbon our product releases in order to know what our products carbon footprint is. We were able to calculate that to make one of our products, we have to