Improving the Project

Today was another day in which we talked about our posters for the food displays. We still need to get the signs approved by Mr. Morris. Once we reached a better understanding of how the signs would be constructed, Mahea emailed him during class. During our class period on May 4th, we have to take a break from the project in order to take a physics test, which could have a negative, neutral, or positive effect on individual multipliers. Compared to other groups, we appear to be far ahead since we already installed our prototype at 'Akahi while the others were still creating theirs. However, we still have other assignments to complete, such as our posters and the oral presentation, and certain events, such as the test and this week's unusual schedule, are impacting our timeline. Hopefully, we can improve our current timeline in order to accommodate all of the things that we need to accomplish.

Learning and Improving

I am very happy to see the progress that my group is making. I am very proud of the work that they got done while I was gone. Because we now know that just putting up display portions is not enough to make an impact on the students, more ideas need to be implemented. This includes creating signs in order to get the attention of the students and to make them aware of the waste. Today I will post on our junior page that signs will be up, urging the student body not to waste. Again, I am very proud of our group and we will continue to do what we were doing (portion examples) plus more (creating signs) to decrease the waste in 'Akahi.

Brainstorming Ideas to Improve

    Today in class we did a lot of thinking. After about a week of our project being implemented we have found many ways to improve it. The first idea we had was to create posters to draw attention to the display plates. Our plan was to make two eight and a half by eleven papers and put a construction paper backing on it to make a nice boarder. One of the papers will read "Take ONLY what you can EAT!" and it also will read "If you are NOT sure then please take the proper portions.". The second paper will read "You can always come back for more". We found out from Mr. Blake that we need to get these approved by the Akahi coordinator as well as the Akahi Student Center. We also thought about a way to make kids realize that they are wasting so we think that putting a big sign above the carousel will help. We are not yet sure what we are going to put on it, but it needs to be approved.
    Besides brainstorming, we went to go set up the portion displays as a group today since we all had the same free time. Todays lunch was Portuguese Bean soup. Setting up was really easy today because all three of us worked together and each made a display.
      Here is what our signs are gonna look like as of today.

Nacho Cheese

  Today I had to set up the proper portion display before lunch started. I went down to lunch thinking that it was breaded beef because that is what the schedule said. Instead we had nachos. The problem between the two is determining portions. The breaded beef comes in a patty and 1 patty is equal to 1 portion, while the nachos has chips that can't be measured well with tongs. Other than the chips everything else was easy to portion because the serving utensils (i.e. spoon) were equal to 1 portion. I displayed these above the two main serving lines.

   Somethings I noticed at lunch today were that people are taking more than the proper portion and some people don't even eat much of their food. Shortly after I had set up the displays, people started to serve themselves. I watched and noticed that not many people looked up at the displays. This was kind of upsetting because we may be potentially adding to the waste instead of decreasing it. Another thing I witnessed at lunch was a student who sat down with a big plate of chips, chili, and cheese at a table near me. He put in his earphones and looked at his food; took a couple of bites, then just stood up, grabbed his tray and left. He literally dumped a whole plate of Nachos. I think this shows that people are not seeing or paying attention to the displays. I think next week we should implement signs above the displays to attract attention to them (we talked about it in class yesterday, Amber mentioned it in the previous blog). I also think that we should create a sense of shame/guilt or some punishment to deter people from wasting a lot of food.

The Sandwich Conundrum

Today was my turn to go to 'Akahi in order to set up our project. The main course of today's lunch was the sandwich bar. At about 10:15 in the morning, I went inside of the dining hall to make the displays. While I made the sandwiches, I noticed that the proper size for the sandwich fillings was two ounces, which is equivalent to two slices of turkey. In general the food items served with tongs are the only ones where the serving sizes on the labels are not helpful in the sense that the tool was not made to measure portions. Although I considered adding other food since each plate only had a sandwich, I decided against it because the officials indicated on our menu that sandwiches were the most wasted food items for that day and nothing else. I made one plate for each of the lines and one of the servers helped to place them at the appropriate locations. During class we talked about how we wanted to design posters to accompany the food. The accompanying material will probably be the main change to our prototype because we want more students to consider the displays as they move through the line.

L(a)UNCHED THE PROTOTYPE (if you could call it a prototype)

It was mentioned in earlier blogs that we agreed that we would alternate taking turns to go down to Akahi and prepare the plates of food for the day. Today was the first day of our experiment and I had period 5 free, so I went down around 10 am and readied the plates of food. Today's entree was roasted chicken, and on the calendar that was given to us, only the roasted chicken was flagged as "high waste." I found it kind of hard to make just a plate of one chicken thigh, so I added the appropriate serving size of rice and carrots to the plates, just to make it look a little livlier. I set the plates up at the beginning of the buffet lines, and propped them up with another plater underneath. I hope that people took notice of the plates though!

I'm thinking of making an announcement in the Seniors page on facebook (and having Allie or Amber do the same for the Juniors page) about our experiment so that they understand what we are trying to do and will hopefully pay attention to the displays. 

More Cooperative Work

Our group has completed the project proposal and detailed design and we are now moving on to the next stages of the project. So, we decided to create a powerpoint on google docs in order to prepare for our presentation. Along with that, we also decided that for the first week we will experiment with just sample portion sizes and then the next week we will have the sample portions and signs to see if that will make a difference. Since I will not be here from the 25-30, my group will keep me updated on progress. Also, the day that I was scheduled to go down early to set up, Ku was also scheduled for that day so it worked out well. We will continue to keep in touch over the course of the week.

Constructing and Assessing: The Next Steps Forward

Although this project involves teamwork, independent work is also required for certain aspects of it. On April 25, each of us has to turn in a midquarter peer review that analyzes the efforts of every team member in regards to contributions. Based on these comments, we will each be notified of what can be done in order to improve individual performance. This week is pivotal because we are installing our prototype. I believe that the main challenge of our design will be noticeability. If we have to make revisions to our project, I think that they will involve making sure that the students recognize what we are trying to accomplish with it.

It's Fryday, Fryday, got to type our Detailed Design on Fryday!

    Today in class, we completed our detailed design on our google document and also set up our calendar for the experiment execution. We had started our detailed design on Tuesday after our meeting with Mr. Morris. For our project we will be constructing examples of proper portions of food. Everyday someone from our group will head down to Akahi to make a "live" example of the proper portions. These examples will be placed in a visible spot where students can notice how much food they should take. This spot is going to be on top of the buffet line islands.
   We also figured out who would set up the examples for each day of the week. Mahea has A days, Amber has B days, Allie has C days, and Kalamaku will have D days. We are to make the portions for the main dishes and display them on these days. We excluded regular, AM and PM schedules because the food waste on those days are not as excessive as on block days.

   The picture above is the calendar of what is being served in Akahi. The items highlighted in pink are the entrees that create majority of the waste.

Monday's THE DAY!

Starting Monday, we will begin our experiment. As mentioned in previous posts, we will take turns going to down to Akahi (food is ready by 9am) and talk with John, who is the main supervisor. If he is not there, the rest of the staff has already been notified that students will be coming down at this time. We mentioned before that we will NOT be creating new tags, but rather creating physical examples for students to see as they grab their food. The food service workers will help us ensure that our portion sizes are accurate because we have access to the scales that they have in the back.

On a side note, an interesting fact that we found out was that the serving utensils that are used during lunch are actually the portion sizes, with the exception of the tongs. Also, we learned that since Akahi began using rice paddles instead of rice scoops, there's been a reduction of waste in rice, which shows that the types of utensils that they use to serve food DOES make a difference.

We acquired a schedule of the meals that will be served for the next four weeks and the main items that are wasted were highlighted for us so that we can gather some data on those items to track the food waste.  That being said, we look forward to implementing our experiment in the days to come!!

Detailed Design and Planning

As was mentioned in the previous blog, one of the things we got straightened out is that we are going to focus on waste of the things that are high volume in waste, usually the main dish. The sandwich above is not one of those high priority items. Now that we know what we are focused on and the plan that we intend to carry out, we now need to create a specific schedule of who will do which tasks when. For example, the plan is that Amber and I will work together during one period (since we have junior lunch together) and Ku and Mahea will work together since they have lunch together. We need to work out who will go down before lunch starts, around 9:00, and set up the example portion sizes. We can do this by determining when we all have frees and creating a schedule from there. This information, plus other information regarding our plans for data collection, will be input into our detailed design.

Approved!

Today was very productive for our group because we got to have our meeting with both the main director and the main manager of our school's food system. After our proposal was officially approved by Mr. Blake, we spent the rest of the period at the 'Akahi food service office. During this meeting we found that our initial plan needed adjustments. For example, we learned that the serving utensils actually are designed to measure the actual serving sizes. Instead of making new tags, we are going to recreate the proper serving sizes of the food items that the staff believed to be the most wasted. We discovered that doing this was less time-consuming than remaking the tags. With the information that we have gathered from the meeting and the approval from the officials, we can now gather data directly from the source and then implement our prototype.

Monday, Bloody Monday. (I hope you caught the reference to U2's song, "Sunday, Bloody Sunday." Also, the Blood Drive is today.))

Today was sort of a hard day to get things for our project done because of the fact that it is an odd-day schedule and we therefore did not have class today. As Kalamaku mentioned before, we have an interview scheduled with Mr. Morris tomorrow and hopefully we can get a lot done and start implementing our plan and make any necessary changes if need be. That being said, Tomorrow should be a very productive day. I've also done some side research as far as appropriate utensils that could be used to serve food items. An observation that the group has made is that recently, Akahi took away the rice scoopers and replaced them with rice paddles, which isn't efficient for ensuring the proper serving size of rice.
We therefore wondered if maybe cleaning utensils like rice scoops is an issue for akahi because cleaning it requires more attention that "the river" or any water pump can give it. Or maybe, they don't have enough to  use each period.

I checked online and there are bigger and better rice scoops that basically just look like giant spoons.

Weekend Wrap Up

     We have 18 days until our prototype has to be created and deployed!! The good news is that we are on track to meeting that deadline. On Friday, Mahea and Kalamaku were unfortunately at the beach for senior picnic and left the Amber and Allie to finalize the proposal paper. The great part was that all four us had done our part and finished the paper Thursday night and all Amber and Allie really had to do was reread it and print in class. Over this weekend Allie was able to get in contact with Mr. Morris, the head honcho of Akahi. She has set up a meeting with him for Tuesday during period 6. We plan to discuss our ideas with him and see what he thinks of it. Hopefully he will be very open to our ideas and that we will be able to implement them in a timely manner. So far everything is working out very well and we plan to keep it that way.

Group 4 Gits it doneeee

What a cute group right? Not only are we cute, but we are also hard working. In class today, we accomplished a lot of writing. First, we split the proposal. Mahea did the "what is your project?" question, Amber and I tackled the "what is your proposed solution?" question, and Ku worked on the "what underlying principles of physics does it incorporate?" question. While writing, we discussed and made final decisions such what precisely our project was going to be and how exactly we would put it into action. Along we that, we realized that we still needed to get some phone numbers, which was fixed easily. When class was over we had about 2.5 pages done. Currently, we are all collaborating on our proposal document that will be turned in tomorrow. When converted from googledocs to word, I will add pictures to the document. Amber and I will read over and print the final proposal tomorrow, as Mahea and Ku go and have a blast at the beach.

Creating a Proposal

As noted in the previous post, our group has found an actual solution for a problem plaguing our school. The next step of the process is to compose an approximately three-page proposal that explains how our project will be beneficial. Aside from answering questions concerning our idea, pictures of the Akahi dining hall will be included to show what our group wants to change. The above image is an example of the insufficient food labeling that results in Akahi's well-known food waste since students are not given any indication of what the portion size looks like. Although the document is due on Friday, the current goal is to complete it before the end of tomorrow's class.

We've Made A Decision...

Today our group came to the conclusion that we are going to go with our idea involving Akahi food waste. It's been a pressing issue for quite awhile, and although this issue has been brought up to the students, waste remains.
Our group has concluded that this mainly results from the fact that although students completely understand  that it's a BUFFET line and that they may always go up for seconds, thirds, even fourths if they wanted, laze combined with impatience (Have you seen the lines?????) prevents them from taking the appropriate portions of food.
We all know about and see the little colored tags above each food item that gives nutrition facts on what's being served. It also gives portion sizes. Unfortunately, these serving sizes are weighed in ounces, and honestly, what kid reads 5oz and knows how much 5 oz of rice is!?
Therefore, we must not only change the tags, but we must also find the appropriate serving utensils to give the correct portions. We can also try and get help from the akahi workers and student government on monitoring how much each student takes. We should also try to find a way to divert a separate line for seconds so that people who have already gotten firsts won't have to stand in the same line as the kids who have not eaten yet.

All in all, we're quite excited to see how all of this falls through :)

If we could make the tags easier to understand, that'd be a great first step!

Project Update

Long weekend, Lots of work.
     On Thursday we got to work together in class and we shared what we learned from our interviews. Well the problem is that we only had 1 successful interview. Allie's interview with Mr. Kim is where most of our ideas are coming from. The other interviews we attempted had failed. So going into this long weekend we had only 1 physically fixable problem. This problem is the waste in Akahi Dinning Hall. Although this is a great idea we are not totally sure how we are going to solve it.
     Over the weekend we were all adding to a google doc. We typed out the ideas to solving the great amount of food wasting in Akahi. Some of our ideas include making certain serving sizes so students don't overload their plates, create a seconds only line so students are encouraged to go back for seconds instead of piling food on the first time because they don't want to stand in a long line for seconds, and our final idea was to create some kind of reward and consequence system. We realized that we are going to need the help and clearance from the Akahi staff.
     Although we have a lot of ideas for this food waste problem, we are looking to talk to more people to find other problems that could be fixed or other ideas to solve this problem.

Krazy Kimmy!

The other day, I interviewed Mr. Kim for some ideas for our 4th quarter project. I thoroughly enjoyed the hour long conversation. The conversation ranged from the problem of lack of discipline of students, to religious topics, to waste in Akahi Dining Hall. He gave us the idea of reducing waste in Akahi by making students thoroughly aware of the waste by creating large and visible graphs and conversions to post in Akahi every so many days. He said it was crucial for student leaders to be involved so that every group could be reached. He also gave me key important to talk to such as Aunty Kat, Mama Fuj and Mrs. Yamamoto. When Kalamaku and I discussed after, he brought up the great question of why students actually take so much to start out with. His insight was that we need to start with making the students aware of how much we are taking. He also brought up the great point that the students should not only have a reward if the waste goes down, but also a punishment if it does not or goes up. The project is still in planning, but we at least now have a good plan to possible work with. The picture above is of my friend Sean with his Akahi grinds. This is a lot of food, but believe me, Sean does not waste one bit. We want everyone to be like Sean.

Day 3

Today was another idea development day for the project. After announcements were made regarding objectives, Allie and Kalamaku left to interview teachers in order to find potentially fixable issues. However, Kalamaku was unable to meet with his administrator, so he emailed him to see if he could conduct the discussion electronically. Mahea conducted a conference yesterday, so our group has met the required number of interviews. The above picture displays one of the benches that are located near the auditorium. When it rains, the benches get soaked even though a roof technically shelters them because of the wind. I would not mind fixing this problem but I'm not sure if we could make a prototype that will be cost effective. Allie uncovered a variety of issues during her interview, so I think that our group will end up using one of them.

Day 2- Help us, Mr. Harvey!

Today was my day to blog, and I figured that today would be a great day to get an interview done, seeing as today was not a class day.
Since Mr. Harvey and I are bros, I decided to ask him what he thought were some "bugs" around campus.
Mr. Harvey is the head of the Art Department is, for the most part, confined to Haleakala. He doesn't go many places around campus, unless the office or The Kif (LOL.) That being said, I'm sorry to say that he couldn't offer me very many suggestions for issues that were tangible. He did, however, mention the problem involving Konia field and the mud when it rains.
After talking to him for about five minutes after school today, our time was cut short because he had to help the detention kids, so I asked him if we could continue our conversation at a later date. Perhaps he'll have better suggestions after conferring with Reid :)

Brainstorming Day 1

     Today was the first official day to start brainstorming about our project. To start off this project we had created a bug list of what we think needs to be changed. Mr. Blake has guided us to go and talk to teachers who, most likely, have a better idea of what needs to be changed because they have been here longer than most of us. With this in mind we decided that we should each find a teacher to interview and hopefully learn about something that can be fixed. Mahea has decided to interview Mr. Harvey, I chose to interview Kumu Chun and Allie chose to interview Mr. Kim. We plan to use the information from these interviewees to add problems to our bug list and hopefully use some of their knowledge to help solve them.
   So far we have not chosen what problem we are going to solve, but we have figured out whose doing the blogs. Our blogs will be posted daily and the person posting it will be cycled. The cycle starts with Mahea, then Amber, then Allie, and finally Kalamaku. This four day cycle will allow us to equally share the work.
   This is as far as we got today and we will start posting information from our interviews soon.

The Lorax

Over the break we were supposed to watch the Lorax. It was actually one of the first things that I did this spring break, watching it the Saturday after Song Contest. It was a very cute and enjoyable movie because of the singing/walking fish, the little bears, and the overall moral of the story.

Basically, the main idea was, "Unless someone like you cares a lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." which was from Dr. Seuss. Ultimately, it takes people to care enough about something in order for action to happen. You have to be able to see the underlying issues and WANT to do something about it in order to bring about change and show others.

Lorax Review

This cute little fellow is the Lorax. He is in charge of the well being of creatures (the cute little bears and fish) and the Truffula trees. He is basically the nature caretaker. All the Lorax ever wanted, was a safe place for nature to grow, thrive, and not be endangered. We want our school to be a place where the students can grow and thrive. This is why we are trying to figure out ways to better our campus in any way possible. In regards to the movie, I thought it was off the chains! It was definitely one of the best animated pictures I have seen. The cast was great, especially Betty White as the grandma, I loved her character. From beginning to end, I was engaged in Ted's quest for the Truffula seed (and love). O'Hare, though the villain of the story, was definitely a funny character. I loved that part when he stepped up to his car by stepping on the hands of his guards. I totally LOLed at that part. The Lorax was definitely an A+ movie experience and hopefully the rest of this project will be too!

Bug List

The picture above depicts a light bulb, often a metaphor for an idea, to symbolize how one should have an awareness of problems in order to initiate any solutions for them. The following is a list of some of the bothersome issues that plague our school campus.
- The mud and dirt on Konia field is a nuisance for those who have to tread on it.
-The students are not sufficiently sheltered from the rain when they are not indoors.
-The benches at the school can get drenched with rain.
-The drivers at school do not carefully observe traffic signs, other cars, and pedestrians.

The Lorax

          The physics assignment given to us for spring break was to watch The Lorax, the one that just came out in the theaters. Well over spring break I found that The Lorax's first movie was made in 1971. It was an old school movie and the imagery was very similar to the drawings in the book. This 1971 movie was in typical Dr. Seuss style, as in there was a lot of rhyming just like in the books. Towards the end of break I was able to watch the new Lorax movie. This movie was much more entertaining, but the story line was a little different. The new Lorax movie had a lot more comedy than the old one. Although these movies had some differences, the idea stayed the same. I think the main idea of these two stories is that Mr. Blake wants us to take away from it is that “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not.” (Dr. Seuss). It's as simple as that. So throughout this project we have to care about what we are doing otherwise it is not worth doing it at all.