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For our major project from this semester and working with the Escondido Creek, I was on the Elfin Forest team. My personal role was to help create a collage book and assist the other half of our team with creating a sliding puzzle. Our products were mainly for kids but they were designed to help people of all ages to understand the importance of the Escondido Creek. I was also one of four people who researched dissolved oxygen and its role in water. As my mother can comfirm, all I can think about when I see fast moving water(rapids)is dissolved oxygen and how it is added/removed from water. I know that is definitely one thing I will take with me beyond just this semester.
Throughout the process of creating our collage book and sliding puzzle, we encountered an unbelievable amount of issues with the puzzle. It all started off fairly smooth with the cutting out of the squares. The first small issue occurred when it came time to sand the pieces. The amount of splinters we were stabbed by was absolutely ridiculous. we ended up having to wear gloves. The next issue occurred with the actual gluing of squares to create the puzzle pieces. We started off with putting too much glue and the pieces for the first few slid around far too much. This made trying to clamp them down to dry overnight more difficult. Some of pieces came out crooked and a bit of glue seeped out of the pieces and dried. When the glue that seemed out dried, it made it nearly impossible to get some of the pieces to slide. Then came the border of the puzzle. Every time we thought it was finally in place and glued, we would come back the next day and find out it in fact was not. That meant we had to cut it at the corners to try to take it apart and fix it. In the end, we eventually sort of got it to work. The easiest part about the whole thing was tracing and painting the image of the watershed. All we had to do was use a small projector to trace. The only hard part about that was tracking down black paint. Even after all of that, we did fairly well for our first try and with the amount of time we had. The collage book containing the different plants, animals, and chemicals in and around the watershed, had far less complications. It was mainly time consuming part of our group had to work on taking all of the research papers that were written by our team and summarize them to fit into the book. They also had to get those checked to make sure all the information provided was truly correct. The only struggle was trying to get a few of our team members to help with the actual composing of the book. There were also a few issues with trying to get the images we needed to print and print them in color. Overall, it all turned out better than any of us expected. |