This is the code of my final product. If you take a look at the three links I showed, you will see a demo video of my project working, the process I went through to get to my final, and also a doc that shows my most effective times that I worked on the project. 

De-StresSAS was a long, but fun process that Armando and I went through. It all started with five of us deciding what exactly it was that we wanted to focus on. The five of us being Lily, Ciana, Bryce, Armando and myself began the "empathy stage" by going out and conducting interviews to try and understand how people at SAS felt. The process of need finding to me personally was probably the most fun part. I enjoyed going out, talking to people and getting to not only understand how they feel at SAS, but I was able to meet new people in the process. I genuinely enjoyed taking notes as if I was a reporter, and I got genuine feedback and had genuine conversations with people at SAS. This process was not only enjoyed by myself, but my group members at the time seemed to also enjoy it. This is what brought us to our next steps, the "need finding stage". This was also a great time of fun because I had a true feeling that we actually had potential to solve a big problem at SAS.

We began the need finding by using a collaborative technique called the fish-bone strategy that basically shows us the root cause to a specific effect. After that we began writing down comments that we recieved from students during our interviews, and we graphed them on the wall in categories of mental, physical, cultural, and educational problems. We were able to narrow our search to conclude that the main two problems at SAS are stress due to environment, homework, and communication issues. We derived our "How Might We..." statement to be "How might we mitigate stress at SAS".  

This is where we split into two groups. One group decided to tackle the communication, while Armando and I decided to stick with the environment and homework issue. When we met with teachers and faculty, we realised that homework would be impossible to do much about, as students have basically no say in how much homework is assigned. This is how Armando and I began the "ideation stage" focusing in on the environment and its contribution to stress at SAS. We found that students are too often pressured by teachers and fellow peers inside and outside the classroom by being asked questions such as "What are your grades?" and "Have you signed up for the ACT/SAT yet?" or "What are your scores?" and also, the envirnment causes students to feel a sense of unhealthy competition. Students are always being pressured by other students and even their parents at school, and at home to participate in clubs, sports, extracurriculars, all while maintaining a competitive GPA, and high test scores... So Armando and I settled on a question "What if there is a magical place students could get away from other students and their parents nagging them and making them so stressed?" and the ideation process guided us to a student lounge idea. We found that other schools use a student lounge as a coping mechanism for stress and also students are less stressed in the school environment becuase of these student rooms according to 2007 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) report. Now that we had descovered the problem, and defined a solution, we began prototyping this idea. We took basic 2D drawings on paper and just simply went around asking students if this room would do anything for them, and if so-- what? Students replied with comments such as "I would be much less stressed with a room like that!" and then provided comments to what they might add or take away from the room. This led us to our next 3D cardboard model, which we did the same thing but it provided a much more detailed idea and vidual for people to understand our proect better. The same comments and few suggestions were given for improvement. It was then when we decided to take our prototype to the next level and make a useable, and life sized model. We transformed the conference room in the Quest room into a baby de-stress room, and invited people to check it out. We only recieved positive feedback and were able to visualise and document people's actual reactions to the idea. 

From then, we defined the project even further and created our business plan. Meeting at Starbucks on weekends and getting together during free times was an ease with the team of two. We not only got things done on-time, but we enjoyed working together. It almost stopped being all about the project, and turned into two partners on a project becoming good friends and creating a friendship out of a school assignment. This made things easy when it came to assigning eachother to tasks, and when we finished with our work, we were able to hangout, go to parties, get lunch, or do whatever in our free time thinking about the project and what our end result would look like. 

Truly this De-StresSAS project not only got me excited about school, but by the end of the project we were both pumped about potentially pitching the idea to admin for perhaps making this a reality. Unfortunatley when Armando and I went up for our Shark Tank pitch, we got good feedback, and realised that maybe it wasn't as great of an idea that we truly thought it to be. Inevitably in the end, we both truly enjoyed working on the project and really wanted to see it suceed. Although it may not become a reality at SAS in the near future, atleast Armando and I learned alot about writing a business plan, and what should be in one. The lessons learned in the end were more valuable to me than the success of the project. I am now more aware of how laborious and tasking the crafting of a proper and successful business/start up can actually be. Well worth every minute spent on attempting to De-StresSAS.