Engineering Brightness

In our Science 9 class, we are working on our engineering brightness project. The point of this project is to create lights to send to the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is in light poverty. They only get up to three hours of light a day, and no light at night. The people sometimes use candles but that often results in houses being burnt down. Their is also a lot of flooding, which also causes loss of electricity. In the Dominican they have payed slavery. Many kids also can’t go to school, and each class has seventy kids with one teacher.

They really do have poor living conditions. This project is a way to help the Dominican Republic one light at a time.

In our class, we are already far on our way to success. To start us off on our project Mr. Robinson our science nine teacher organized a Skype call in the Dominican Republic. We spoke to two educators, Eladio and Dennis. We also spoke to two of their students who stayed after school to talk to us. They told us all we know about the Dominican. Their school is an elite private school, and according to them it is very similar to our own public school. The kids who attend this school have technology and light throughout most of the day. They are also working on the engineering brightness project, and they are our connection to the Dominican Republic.

A couple days later, we had another Skype chat with New Brunswick. We shared our ideas, and then one person from every group asked questions that they have about Engineering Brightness. Mr. Fogarty gave us many helpful answers and tips for our own project. He spoke a bit about a light design some of his other students had created, and also how much money we might need in order to buy all the supplies we need. It was very helpful and clarified most of our ideas on Engineering Brightness. Bellow is a video of Sabrina one of the other girls in my group asking Mr. Fogarty her question.

These Skype calls have been such amazing opportunities. They have really shown that we can make a difference and how we have to make a difference with the light poverty in the Dominican Republic.

For our own project, we are going to focus on fundraising. Quite a few groups want to build the lights and they need the funds to do that, and that is where we come in. We want to have enough money to buy all the supplies and parts we need to make the lights. We want to collaborate with Pitt River Middle, and possible Mary Hill elementary, as they are both some of our previous schools and we know that they could be amazing groups of fundraisers. Our hopes are that they will help with fundraisers with in their own schools as well. We would also really like to raise awareness. Part of the problem is that nobody knows the light poverty situation in the Dominican Republic. It is not a commonly known problem and we would like to change that. Our plan is to create posters to put up all around our community, and create other forms of sharing our ideas publicly. An idea around that is going and speaking at city hall, as they could help there and would get us publicity.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-0-1biwyZ-jYTBVcHhDcVJLN2s

So far we have poster designs, and have contacted Pitt River about partnering with them. Throughout the next few weeks we will complete our plan. Our goal is to raise $500 towards Engineering Brightness.