Project Proposal and Progress
Week 1+2
Objective:
Keep up with lectures, tutorials and readings to become more aware of community-based experiential learning.
Achievements:
- Familiarized ourselves with the different community-based projects
- Read into and became comfortable with the learning objectives
- Chose projects which spoke to our interests
Week 3+4
Objective:
Understand our project and get to know the members of the group.
Achievements:
- Got in touch with our community partner, Ryan
- Met with our community partners in person, and attended orientation along with other groups
- Had a basic understanding about the project
- Crafted a team charter and identified each other’s strengths and assigned tasks for individuals
- Posted our first blog
- Finalized our ideas and made sure everyone in the group is aware of the goal and objectives of the project.
- Contacted our community partner, and set up a time to meet at a elementary school to have a casual conversations with kids.
- Set up rough dates to show Ryan our chapter ideas, draft and final recipe books.
Week 5+6
Objective:
Have a clear idea of what our goals, finish the project proposal and set up a visit in an elementary school
Achievements:
- Created our group proposal, highlighting the background, significance, research questions, and methods
- Came up with the layout of the recipe book. This includes different chapters that will be used to organize the recipes.
- Haven’t heard back from our community partner about the school visit yet, but hopefully it can happen next week.
Moments of Significance:
What:
One moment of significance that has occurred so far has been with the development of the chapters. We have been gathering together and discussing about how to categorize food recipes quite often these couple weeks and we all got to know each other better especially throughout activities in class. We have been in contact with our community partner, Robyn Ryan, to finalize the chapters that will be included in the book. This includes the wording of the chapters as well. As originally we wanted to include “Desserts for Breakfast” and have sweeter yet healthier recipes, our community partner suggested that the wording may be inappropriate and can lead to promotion of dessert. This was not our intentions. In addition, our meeting with a local elementary school which was supposed to happen 2 weeks ago, still hasn’t happened yet, because our community partner didn’t reply or contact us for the past two weeks, thus we are sort of behind in our recipe book development.
So What:
From this, we have done a lot of research on different recipes that would be suitable for our desired chapters. We learned how wording can influence breakfast choices within the program. Simply having the word dessert within the recipe book may mislead users into serving sugary breakfast options compared to the ones given in the book. We are now more aware of these little things and are becoming more careful with our wording.
“Certain kinds of difficulty, certain kinds of obstacles, can actually improve our performance.”(Harford, 2016). As Tim Harford (2016) explained in his Ted Talk, when we are having some problems in our project that stops us from proceeding, that is when we should step out of our box since “the box we have is full of holes.” (Harford, 2016) It was frustrating when we were asked to take out certain materials or some categories, but there is no doubt that it also allows us to think of other things to substitute in. We believe that being able to accept criticism leads to better growth and can benefit the project.
Now What?
From this learning, we have gone back to editing the chapters to make sure the wording is appropriate for what we are trying to suggest. Our next actions include editing the chapters and continuing with the recipe book development, ensuring that the options provided are nutritional and also affordable. We will take the criticism that we receive from our community partner and use it to better our chapter ideas. Since we haven’t heard back from our community partner about the school visit, we will continue to try to get in contact with them so that we can plan a school visit as soon as possible. Since visiting schools and talking with kids and volunteers are crucial for us to understand kids’ food preferences and all the challenges volunteers encountered with when prepares food, we will try to get our visit done by the deadline of our first draft. Then we will have more thoughts on editing by the time we get feedbacks from our community partner. We hope that by visiting the school, we will be able to figure out the cooking settings that are available in schools and the breakfast kids have currently, which gives us a better idea of what we have and how we could improve. In the upcoming weeks, we will focus on ensuring what we are doing aligns with our objective and taking into account what our community partner is concerned about. We should assign individual work to each member and have regular team check-ins making sure everyone is on the same page and there are no overlaps in content.
We will also do some research and brainstorm new ideas that would contribute to our recipe book. For instance, what kind of ingredients meet the needs of nutrition and low cost. By doing this, we will need to make our objectives a reality in order to achieve our aims and implement deadlines for our ongoing work to keep our group organized and maximize our efficiency.
Upcoming Objectives and Strategies
Week 7
Objective:
Work on researching and creating recipes with community partners guidelines. And schedule a time for school visiting this week.
Strategies to achieve:
- Starting up with brainstorming ideas for different chapters
- Researching academic literature and online resources
Week 8
Objective:
Learn how to display collected data in a clear and effective way
Strategies to achieve:
- Each of our members looks up for 8-9 receipts
- Come together as a group with our ideas and put them together
- Everyone post their inputs by October 23
Week 9
Objective:
Understand what is required to complete a strong and well-done final project
Strategies to achieve:
- Asking for feedbacks from our community partner
- Refer back to initial goals to make sure our recipe book is within the designated guidelines of the project
- Working as a group coming up with a plan for editing
week 10
Objective:
Resend in all the drafts for final edit
Strategies to achieve:
- Distributing individual work to each group member.
- Focusing on checking grammatical errors and designing layouts for the recipe book
Reference:
Harford, T (2016). How messy problems can inspire creativity Ted Talks 2016.[Video File]. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/Jd_j_kw_jZQ