It has been a few week since our last post. In this post, we will update you on our weekly objectives and achievements. Since our project is coming to an end soon, we will be sharing a summary of our moments of significant change below. In addition, we have finalized our video and posted it on Youtube!

Feel free to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbw8H2pNU48&feature=youtu.be

Weekly Objectives:

By Nov. 5th

• Finish editing the video (add music, cut clips together, add important captions)

By Nov. 8th

• Communicate with community partners for feedback on completed video

By Nov. 9th

• Create a survey for data collection that will be linked in the description box of the Youtube video

By Nov. 10th

• Posting the video on the social media (Youtube and various Facebook pages) and begin collecting data

By Nov. 15th

• Start working on the infographic and final report

Achievements:

On Oct. 25th

• Met with community partners to discuss our video idea

On Oct. 29th

• Finished filming video scenes
  • Coffee cups falling out of locker
  • Multiple scenes showing how cups are consistently disposed of

What?

Moments of Significant Change Workshop:

During our Moment of Significant Change workshop, we created a graph showing our personal progression in knowledge and emotion from the start of term to now. The y-axis represented both knowledge and emotion while the x-axis represented progression of time. The red line represents emotion while the blue line represents knowledge. Some of our significant events included our community partner meetings, our proposal, and blog postings. As shown on the graph, the our knowledge increased with time, whereas our emotions tended to fluctuate throughout the term.

Our emotion was the highest when we had the first meeting with our community partners. We were excited to work with City Studio and the City of Vancouver and contribute to the community that cares about environmental sustainability. Our goal is to promote awareness of waste reduction. They gave us a lot of encouragement for this project. Next, we were required to write a blog. None of the members in our group had blog writing experience, so we struggled on the content and the writing style. When we got our blog mark back, our emotion dropped a lot. The next assignment was a proposal on our project (please see previous two blogs). Our emotion dropped to the lowest after we received a low mark and feedback for our proposal. We were confused about the direction of our project and how to achieve the goals and expectations. However, things were getting back on track after we had the second meeting with our community partners. They provided us with a more clear direction and feasible advice about our video. Therefore, our stress level decreased dramatically from then. We hope this positive flow of energy continues throughout the remaining term.

At first, we had limited knowledge as we were just starting the course. However, our knowledge continued to increase with time. Our knowledge increased dramatically after the proposal write up and the the greatest after the second meeting with the community partner.

So what?

Significance:

During our Moment of Significant change workshop, we were able to visually review what we have done and evaluate our performance throughout the term to make improvements in the future. We noticed that the majority of our significant emotions resulted from a struggle to understand the expectations of tasks, difficulties in communicating with group members and low grades on assignments. We noticed that all of these are instances of uncertainties. Although it was challenging and frustrating, it was important to overcome the uncertainty in all situations because it is inevitable. We reminded each other to embrace the problems with positive outlook. In addition, to cope with the uncertainty we were dealing with, we tried to focus on what we could control such as adjusting our group dynamic. We stressed the importance of focusing on our project goal because the end project might be valuable for future use. Although we did not realize at the time, these emotionally negative events actually result in a gain of knowledge. We believe that the uncertainty we experienced was a huge factor because comfortable situations does not require as much thought.

Now What?

Strategies for Successful Project Completion:

In order to successfully complete our Zero Waste project, our group will use a variety of strategies. Most importantly, we will continue to remind each other that any uncertainty that will occur should be handled with a positive outlook. For successful project completion, we will work on our group dynamics by cooperating with one another. We will assign tasks that correlate to the strengths of each member. We will do this by continuing to meet after tutorial every week to work on upcoming tasks. We will set up more times to meet with one another if our weekly objectives was not completed. Additionally, for divided tasks, we will check on each other to ensure that we are keeping up with deadlines. We plan to send our partners our video asking for feedback. We will send the email and video link early in order to use their feedback then make necessary adjustments. After the video feedback is received, we will make ourselves a detailed and feasible timeline. We will check this timeline regularly to ensure that we are staying on top of our schedule. We will then compile our research and data and start working on our final presentation, infographic, and final report. Finally our infographic will include significant findings and will be presented at the LFS final project showcase as well as the Hubbub event. We hope that our  project will provide data that can be incorporated into further waste reducing projects in our community.