For our final project of the year, we were told to recreate one of our old projects that we felt that we can improve on. My group (Liz King, Lydia Maxon, Rebecca Oblities, Olivia Matheson)thought that the project that we could all improve on was the creative engineering project. For this project, we needed to create a solution to a world problem, make a prototype and present.
We chose food waste because it is a huge problem that could be fixed if everyone started to pay more attention to waste and worked more towards reducing waste.. Food waste creates lots of different types of problems, such as impacting the environment by producing methane gas in the air. Food waste also contributes to world hunger. It wastes gas, money, water and energy. My group completed some research on waste, and we found that people waste food based on appearances. People start to waste food when it looks old or stale. The is still good, but it just looks bad. . Deformed fruits and vegetables are commonly thrown away even though they are perfectly edible. If we could solve this problem, there would be a significant change in the percentage of food waste.
We came up with an idea to persevering food so that it can last longer. We thought that we could use a vinegar and water solution so that we could extend a food's expiration date. For this project, we made three separate solutions ( 50% water, 50% vinegar, 100% water, 100% vinegar) and put different fruits and vegetables in the solution for 15 minutes. We then waited for 4 days to see how well each solution persevered each food. We found out that our experiment did not work for all of the fruits and vegetables, so we also created a different solution to reach our end goal.
Using berries in our experiment, we decided to take unwanted berries from farms and soak them in a 100% vinegar solution for just 15 minutes to extend the shelf life of the berries, This helps berries look fresh longer. We decided we can sell berries that would be wasted for a small amount : $2-$3 per pound. We will have different fruit stands that will sell these berries at low cost, and the money we make will cover the cost of the refrigeration and transportation. Our goals is to be able to donate some of the money to soup kitchens to help the homeless. We can also make other products wit the berries that cannot be sold such as jams and other products such as food dies.
Concepts: while there isn't any physics concepts for this project, there is a thought process behind this, which is the engineering design and build cycle: Engineering design and build cycle: 1. Identify the need 2. Research the problem 3. Develop possible solutions 4. Select most promising solution 5. Construct the prototype 6. Test and evaluate prototype 7. Communicate the design 8. Redesign 9. Repeat
Independent variable: A variable that does not depend on others
Dependent variable: A variable that depends on others
Controlled variable: A variable that remains constant
Reflection: I really enjoyed doing this project, because it was quick and fairly easy. Our group worked really well together and we stayed on task the whole time. We didn't have too many problems for the project, but I think that the solution was too simple and was a little rushed. We could have done more research before we started testing the solution. We also had a lot of time after we were done with the project, and I think that we all started to not work as efficiently. However, I think that we did a good job with coming up with a solution quickly and we finished before the deadline. We didn't plan too much ahead of time on what we were going to do which I think contributes to the reason why we didn't have a solution that worked. But, I think that now I did this project again, I understand more on how to create a better design with more research.