Yesterday’s CBL Forum project went very well. Because we don't have a physical object to bring in for our solution Sadie and Sam made mini sea turtle cookies and brought them to the forum.In the beginning we didn’t have our cookies out and not a lot of people came to look at our idea. Then later we did put the cookies out and lots of people came and were very interested not only in the cookies but in our project. By the end of the forum most of them were gone. We used the cookies to attract people to come to our project because they knew if they asked questions they would get cookies. It really was an eye opening experience to see what our other classmates had accomplished and how amazing and well thought there ideas were. It was so cool to be out there making a change for the sea turtles one cookie at a time! -Sam Snow We have come a long way but we finally have come up with our final idea. We are going to get the word out about diving for plastic and trash and partner with scuba diving companies to make that possible. Throughout the week we put out more flyers around Abbot Kinney, Santa Monica, and Beverly Hills. This is another way to get the word out through social media and through flyers. We have an instagram that helps tell people what we are doing and what our project is. On Friday, Sam and Sadie made around 200 sea turtle cookies to hand out at the forum to not only give everyone a treat but to inform them about our project. The cookie idea is a great idea because people will want to come to our stand for cookies but before they get any they will have to listen to our presentation and answer questions. This will make everyone pay attention and overall like our project. There is a lot that we could yo to change our solution but one thing that I think we could do is really spend more time reaching out to organizations and find one main one to partner with and help us complete our solution. Overall this week has been great and very productive we are excited for our presentation!
-Sadie Olmos This week we put our fliers all around our school, the marina delrey, Abbot Kinney, dive shops... We also came up with a poster for our school presentation, to tell people what we are trying to do. We had called an organization like “heal the bay” if they wanted to help us, because we need a permit and a license, but we don’t need one if we work with another organization. - Marielle Lerner
Our day with the faculty went very well. We got feedback from many different teachers and they all gave us great advice and great feedback. Some things that we all learned about our solution is that there is already an organization that does what we want to do so we have to do scuba diving locally. We are working with the Los Angeles, Florida and San Diego community to get people out there scuba diving for debris. We are super productive in trying to get our problem fixed and help solve turtle migration. This solution will have an impact on the community becuase everyone will want to help save the turtles and scuba dive so its a fun and helpful solution. We are going to measure in the long term how many sea turtles migrate and the difference of before and after. Overall everything is going great and we are right on track. - Sam Sow Over this last week we have contacted many different organizations including https://4ocean.com , https://www.tdisdi.com/elearning/ , https://conserveturtles.org , and https://www.seeturtles.org . All of these organizations have helped us decide on two main problems we wanted to focus on. The first problem was how plastic pollution affects sea turtles. We researched a lot and found out that a lot of the reason turtles die is because they mistake plastic and other pollution for food. From an email sent from someone who works at Conserve Turtles, we found out that hatchlings when they are born, spend time in sargassum seaweed mats offshore. These mats give them food and protection. But, the mats also collect micro plastics, making hatchlings accidentally eat the plastic. This also happens with adult sea turtles. Sea turtles have downward facing spines making it nearly impossible to regurgitate. Because of that, this plastic makes it really hard for them to swallow and eat. Our second problem included boats crashing into sea turtles and hurting their skulls and bodies. This is a huge issue but a lot broader. It really matters what speed the boat is going at and how large it is. This happens a lot where boats run into sea turtles breaking their skulls and killing them. It’s a massive issue that really isn’t thought about a lot. We came with two solutions. For the first problem, we came up with the idea of during scuba divers routines we have the pick up trash in highly polluted areas where turtles pass through. We will pair with the scuba diving organizations and see if we can get a group if scuba divers to go out to different locations of the coast and pick up trash during their routines. With this solution came a lot of feedback. For example, who is going to do this? How are we going to convince scuba divers to change their routines to help us? What are we going to do about where they go? Many problems came up but, we were able to come up with solutions. We have decided it will be voluntarily. We will pair with one or more organizations along the coast and see how any people would volunteer to go out and do this. For the second problem, we came up with the idea of boat bumpers. Pretty much we get something for the bottom and around the boat that will make the impact a lot less harmful to sea turtles if they crash into a boat. With that solution cam many more problems. How will we convince people to change there boats? How much money will this cost? Do we have the resources to make this? For these problems it was a lot harder to come up with how we would fix our idea with these problems in mind. Because of that, we decided to go with the first idea. We will pair with scuba diving organizations to pretty much do underwater beach clean ups. It will be a start but, we will do it very often, whenever the scuba divers do routines. We still have to find the organization but we have some options. We plan to also talk to some faculty that is involved in scuba diving and the service learning committee about beach clean ups. -Sadie Olmos https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140414-ocean-garbage-patch-plastic-pacific-debris/Hi, we are Sam, Sadie and Marielle. We have a school project called CBL in which we have to help turtles during their migration. One of the problems that we wanted to help with was the amount of plastic in the ocean. Plastic causes severe problems for the turtles because they end up eating it and getting stuck in it which can kill them.
When we were placed into a group we all knew we wanted to do something about the ocean and the sea turtles. We were trying to come up with something so we decided to help out with plastic pollution. Our idea is that we are going to team up with a scuba diving company and to train them to clean up the plastic. During their dives, they would clean polluted places. We plan to call, email, contact .different scuba and turtle organizations. -Marielle Lerner |