For Innovation Day, Grade 7 had to build animal structures. My partner and I built a Puerto Rican parrot shelter. Puerto Rican parrots are critically endangered, with only about 300 left in the wild, due to industrial deforestation, capture, natural disasters and more. Our project is called the Puerto Rican Parrot Preservers, and we built a structure to help save them! Our structure is meant to replicate the natural tree cavities which Puerto Rican parrots nest in. Since their habitat is shrinking because of deforestation, tree cavities are harder to come by, and that’s why we built a structure to give them a new spot to nest in. This blog post will be about how I felt and what I learned preparing the project that my partner and I made, during Innovation Day and after. First of all, before we even started the project, I was excited to build the physical prototype. However, we had to write and learn about structures and our animal first. It was quite interesting, but also stressful since there was quite a bit of deadlines. Later, when it was time to work on the prototypes, we started making our online prototype on Cospaces before we built our physical structure. If you’re wondering what Cospaces is, it is an AR and VR coding platform. This was one of the harder parts to present because some people don’t do well with VR and for others it was also hard to learn to move around. Additionally, designing the Cospaces was quite fun but also tricky sometimes because it didn’t have all the objects we wanted to include. We had to be resourceful, and a friend from another group also showed us how to make an ordinary scarlet macaw look like a green Puerto Rican parrot. In the end, I think it turned out pretty good. This is how one part of our online prototype looked:
The ladders and stairs are there so when you play it, you can get back up to the main structure if you decide to go down to look at other details.
After we decided that the Cospaces was mostly finished, we started working on the physical build. When my partner and I started building the physical prototype, I was excited, but also a tiny bit overwhelmed because I didn’t really know where to start. My partner brought in an enormous box that we thought was perfect because it was a great size, but we couldn’t find anything big enough to use for the dome roof! This part of the building process was very difficult for us and frustrating because we had to restart our whole physical build. Thankfully, we have some nice classmates who helped us and another group that also had something terrible happen to their project rebuild. Later, to get back on track, we went home to work on the physical prototype. I think this was an action that really contributed positively to our project because after working at home on the structure and trifold board twice (we worked on the research once at home as well), we managed to build a great prototype and have an amazing trifold board to present. For me, working on the trifold and the structure was definitely the most fun part.
Finally, Innovation Day came! At first, I was incredibly nervous to present to the judges. I was quite stressed about the set-up since everyone only got a quarter of a table. We had a giant project, with two extra stands (one collage and our Works Cited page), our prototype, a laptop for playing Cospaces without the VR part (if someone didn’t like VR), another laptop for playing parrot noises and our extra-large beautiful poster board (the credit for that goes mostly to my partner). We managed to find a solution: borrowing a cart to put most of the things on. The first time presenting to a judge did make me nervous, but it was a judge I knew, so it was easier. I think I used words such as “like” a bit to much, but it was okay in the end. The part that made me most nervous after presenting to the judges was when I realized we forgot to say almost all of our Test section out loud to our second judge. The “Test” section is what feedback we got when showing our projects to our classmates. This part is something I feel we could have done better on. However, we didn’t have much to really answer though, because some questions we were asked had already been answered in our paragraphs and a lot were the same. There were helpful questions too, but we didn’t have to make many changes because they were questions more about the structure itself than what to add or remove.
Furthermore, I think we still did well, though we did have some room to grow. Innovation Day was quite stressful and made me nervous, but also was fun and exciting. In the future, I would like to try thinking of the next steps as well as what I would be doing in the moment. If we had paused to measure if the roof actually fit, we could have saved a lot of time. I believe that we really have learned from that mistake. Right after we had to restart, when we needed a new box, we measured the roof and tried to make the box exactly the right size. On our trifold, before gluing everything, we checked for anything that needed to be reprinted or was in a less-than-ideal spot. This is our trifold before gluing anything: All the crooked papers and papers in the wrong spot were fixed, by the way, and we did need to reprint something, so it’s good that we checked.
Overall, I believe that our project was quite successful, even if we could have done a bit better. Innovation Day was stressful, but we persevered and did well. Another lesson that Innovation Day teaches us is that putting in some extra effort really pays off. Including unique things also helps, though don’t suggest copying others because it can really annoy the other side, since it’s stealing what makes their project unique. We included a unique thing, but I’m going to let you think of one for your projects your own. Ultimately, I am super happy and proud of our project, the Puerto Rican Parrot Preservers, to have won 3rd place out of all the Grade 7 projects.
