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.