For four months (until the school shutdown) our team met at least once or twice a week at lunch to discuss our plans for the year. With the support of our advisor, Ms. Davis, we delegated club board positions to qualified members, including secretary, fundraising commissioner, and event commissioner. Considering the several focuses of our mission statement, we also decided it would be practical to divide the rest of CAMS GBLA into groups led by leads: civic engagement, engineering, media, and research. After in-person meetings were made impossible, we utilized Facebook Messenger and made several group chats for each focus area.
We also partnered with another non-profit operating at CAMS: Hack4Change. Together, we meant to organize outreach events at elementary schools where we could teach children about marine pollution and coding together in the form of a make-it-yourself Scratch game.
The Design Process + Our Prototype (pre-COVID)
The main focus of our team pre-COVID was to create a prototype of an easy-to-use BPA indicator that would detect severity of water plastic pollution. We used what we learned from our Engineering curriculum at CAMS - the engineering Design Process.
We originally planned to allocate a majority of our budget into the development of this prototype, including buying a 3-D printer, test strips, swabs, and ferric chloride for use in our BPA indicator.
Unfortunately, we were never able to finish designing the prototype before schools shut down, and our budget was used elsewhere.
Our Project Planners
The events below were cancelled due to complications related to COVID-19.
The COVID-19 crisis limited what kinds of events the team could plan. Virtual workshops on Zoom were a viable replacement, though, to the classes we'd planned on hosting with Hack4Change.
We decided to design an easy-to-make Scratch game where the objective would be to rid the ocean of pollutants. We even added little facts about the harmful effects of ocean plastics into the gameplay.