Our plan for this project was constantly changing and evolving. When our group first formed our theme was environmental support and our first step was need finding. We brainstormed a list of unbiased questions to determine what students knew about the environment at SAS, we found a severe lack of knowledge about SAS environmental efforts. So once we identified the need as lack of awareness we started brainstorming ideas, because our target audience is high schoolers we knew we couldn't force them to care by just giving them facts we needed an engaging method to catch their attention. General environmental efforts of SAS is extremely broad so we decided to narrow down our topic to food waste and recycling at SAS. Our fun interactive idea to bring attention to food waste at SAS was an SAS farmers market, where SAS students could grow and sell organic foods on campus. Our idea to encourage students to recycle paper more was a game called recyclball, a regular recycling box with a hoop on top to add the element of fun, students would sub conciously enjoy recycling. We made cardboard prototypes of each idea and our recyclball idea evolved very quickly as we continuously epanded on ideas. However, we eventually decided this was not the most effective way to increase awareness of paper recycling and we stated brainstorming again. We thought that if the high school actually knew how much paper they used and wasted in total they would be more concious about their paper usage. Our idea to show them is to put a huge transparent box at a central point in school where we would dump the paper thrown in the recycling into our box, recyclbox, and let the high school watch as the mass amounts of paper we collected piled up. Once we settled on this idea there was a lot of logistics to figure out, such as how we would collect and empty the paper, the location of the box, size, price,etc. For the dimensions of the box, we knew the box was going to be transparent and it should be large, so that people could actually see the paper. The original estimation was at 12X12 ft acrylic plexiglass box, but we realized that was unnecessairily huge even for SAS's paper usage, so we altered it to 6X12 ft. When we contacted the supplier DAMA and found out that the largest size of acrylic plexiglass they sell was 4X8, and we measured the volume of the recycling containers usually filled each week, we settled on an 8X8 ft box. For the location we knew we wanted somewhere that would get a lot of foot traffic, but if we put it somewhere in the cafeteria it would obstruct the space and get in the way, and we couldn't put it in the foyer because a huge box of paper isn't very appealing to the school aesthetic. But the atrium seemed like a great location, it was central and visible from all floors, it would be easy to access when we need to empty and fill it, and it gets a lot of foot traffic during breaks but there is a lot of space so it wouldn't cause any road blocks. When we built our prototype using the laser cutter in the makers space we discussed many different ways to fill and empty the box, a door was our first idea, but as the box started to fill with paper we ouldn't be able to just pull open a door without all the paper spilling out. We ended up attached a string to the top of the box that could be used to pull of the lid and then with the help of a ladder we could shovel paper in and out, still not ideal but the best option we came up with. Another thing in consideration was data collection, we needed a way to check if our box was actually making an impact. We decided to code a graphic user interface (GUI) that would be displayed on a small screen connected to the box, this would give an exlanation of how much paper we collected from where in how many days. It would also have a question along the lines of: Does this change your view of recycling at SAS? Below would be a button they could press to answer yes and we would keeo track of how many times the button was pressed. We think this would work because in order to be able to press the button you would have to take a moment to come up and inquire about what the box is and think about paper usage at SAS. One of the most difficult factors was the price, after calculating all our supplies the total cost was alomst $4,000, obviously our project didn't have that kind of money so we would need donations. The problem with asking for donations is that our project had no source of revenue to refund an investor. We came up with the idea of advertising to raise money, we would offer space on our box to companies around school like subway and Baja Fresh to advertise. However, we weren't keen on this idea because we want students to focus on the environmental aspect of this box not the advertisments, also it is highly unlikely we could get $4,000 advertising on just our box. We figured that when we ask admin for approval to build teh box and put it in the location we would ask for funding as well. After all the weeks spent on this unit we came up with a worthwhile project and a finished prototype. 

from Tkinter import *

 

class Application (Frame):

   

   def __init__(self, master):        # Initialization is a constructor method

       Frame.__init__(self,master)  

       self.grid()

       self.button_clicks =0           # For counting number of button clicks

       self.create_widgets()

       

   def create_widgets(self):         # Orders for button

       self.button= Button(self)

       self.button["text"] = "Click here if this changes your view on recycling at SAS"

       self.button["command"] = self.update_count

       self.button.grid()     # Put on grid so it shows up

       

   def update_count(self):   # To increase the count when the button is clicked

       self.button_clicks +=1

       self.button["text"] = "Click here if this changes your view on recycling at SAS" + str(self.button_clicks)

       

root = Tk()         # Line is necessary for buttons to appear

root.title("repsychology")  

root.geometry("200x200") # width by height in a string

 

app = Application(root)

 

root.mainloop()  # In order for button process to repeat