Exhibition NATURE Group: Sara, Kaitlyn & Ching Yi

We think our group did well at using Research Skills, Communication skills, and Self-Management Skills. We did well at Researching Skill when looking into our key concept questions. We also collected, recorded and organized our data findings into reports and cornell notes. We had made a basic plan with each other, every time we started to research. We think we used Communication Skills because we sharing ideas. We are doing good group cooperation and listening each other. We also making connections. We think we used lots of Self-management Skills because we were all focusing on the task and complete and time and went ahead. We are organized work and set up safety.  

We were passionate about the environment and taking care of it. Our goal was to spread awareness on Marine Life pollution because it is one of the biggest problems in our Earth. We took action by writing letters to Gastro Guys to persuade them to use biodegradable and reusable cutlery instead of serving plastic ones. Then we wrote Cold Storage to persuade them to charge for plastic bags. We had a good reply from each of them. Gastro Guys replied saying they also do not want to use plastic. But the only reason that they use plastic was so it is easy to bring or move food to the school. Also because they did not want food to get soggy with biodegradable containers. Cold Storage replied telling us that they do a lot already like getting the cashiers to ask customers if they have reusable bags, and they also said they are happy if we reply or have anything else to add.

Our mentor was Ms. Kate and she helped us with a lot of things. In our group meetings, we brainstormed workshop ideas together. We looked into cornell notes, questions and action plans to see what we could change or improve in them. Ms. Kate also helped us find good materials for the workshop. For example she gave us the plastic we needed for the windows. Later on leading up to the exhibition, she helped us create a structure for the workshop and what would happen there. She guided us on to the right track so we could continue planning the workshop.    

Our workshop idea was to make people experience what being around plastic is like when coming into our workshop. That would start our presentation with a huge impact with a help poster they look at. Then we would bring them to 4 stations. Plastic pollution, Oil spills, Chemicals, and Global warming, which has activities and cool experiences. Even other things like experiments and role plays that our audience needed to observe. At the end, after we knew they were aware of marine life issues, we showed them actions and solutions to these problems. There were videos and slideshows that made people leave willing to take action. We knew we had made an impact on people and inspired them to help marine life when we looked at the feedback wall.

We feel that each station went well in some way. We knew that our audience enjoyed the oil cleanup activity, sunscreen experiment and chemicals game, and global warming storm. The feedback wall talked a lot about these things and how people learnt from it. Something that we found challenging was when we had some problems digitally like the music and connections with the internet and projector. It was harder to present to the middle schoolers because some did not listen and participate.