We have just concluded the first week of our #Design2030 design challenges! 15 Days until school starts up again. 15 Goals for a Sustainable World. A perfect opportunity for your child to flex their brainpower to create, innovate, and share some of their best ideas on what they would like the world to look like by the year 2030.
Thank you so much to all of the students who participated this week! The team absolutely loved looking over your projects. You should all be very proud of your hard work.
The purpose of this project is to provide families with meaningful projects that they can work on over the break, as well as to increase awareness about the UN Goals and how we all play a part in achieving them. Participants will take part in a variety of daily challenges that ask them to develop solutions to help create a safe, inclusive, and equal future for their generation!
Here’s how it works:
Each day, we’ll be posting a challenge based on one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and we want to hear your ideas on how to help reach them!
Every day around 10:00 am, our Chief Creativity Officer Sam will go live on Facebook to introduce two challenges for the day; one for our 4-7 and one for 8-14 age groups respectively. All challenges for our 4-7 age group will be posted here. All challenges for our 8-14 age group will be in our #Design2030 online course.
To participate, all you have to do is read the challenge, create your idea, and get a parent/guardian to help you post it on the challenge submission page! Submissions can also be posted in the comments of the corresponding Facebook live video.
Now it is time to celebrate all of our awesome submissions! If you missed out this week, no worries! There are still two more weeks for you to get involved.
Challenge Day 1: No Poverty
Our challenge to students was: “Can you build a strong enough tower to survive an earthquake? Use LEGO, blocks, or any other materials you have at home to build a tower that survives the force of a shaking table!” Have a look at how they completed this challenge
Kuba (Age 5) made a structure to withstand an earthquake!
“This is my structure. It is strong because there’s a deep foundation with no cracks in it. I made a triangular roof with shingles to make sure that all the water from a storm would drain off the roof and into the yard. I made sure that on the bottom of the structure I sealed the bottom so no water could get into the foundation. In my structure I made it so it would be strong against earthquakes by having most of the weight on the bottom of the structure. If there was more weight on the top, and if there was an earthquake the weight being on the bottom would stop the building from falling down from the top. My foundation would be important too in that case to stop the building from falling even from the top. But if the foundation was too small it would fall over anyways.” – Evan
Here is my house for the poverty challenge, for this I would use two shipping containers on stilts with a sloped roof for the rain to drain off. The pillars are wide and deep into the ground so that they can withstand an earthquake, while being off the ground to protect the home from flooding. Using shipping containers makes it more affordable as well as the strength of the steel. – David
Challenge 2: Zero Hunger
The STEM Minds challenge: “One of the ways that we can combat hunger is to help small farms and local farmers to increase their production. One of the specific goals that the UN is working towards is to double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, in particular women, indigenous peoples, family farmers, pastoralists and fishers, including through secure and equal access to land, other productive resources and inputs, knowledge, financial services, markets and opportunities for value addition and non-farm employment by the year 2030.
Your challenge for today is to pick a country that has a large population of small-scale farming, and then draw/design a prototype that would help these farms increase the amount of food that they can produce.
“For my zero hunger project I decided to make my design. Moldova is a poor country, but has a decent amount of farming, but their materials are not very helpful to the max. My design shows how the greenhouse would be helpful to help in windy and cold climates in fall or winter to still keep crops growing. While also the Aerogarden helps with extra light so plants can grow faster so they can plant more faster and get more food. Since Moldova is a poor country it is hard to pay for all the energy so I created solar panels and a water wheel to help power the light.” – Deea
Challenge 3:Good Health and Wellbeing
The challenge: One of the UN’s targets for this goal is to substantially reduce the number of deaths and illnesses from hazardous chemicals and air, water, and soil pollution and contamination by the year 2030.
Using materials that you have around the house, design a prototype that would help people detect hazardous chemicals in one of the following areas: air, water, or soil.
“It is important to know if the air you are breathing is not hazourdos because you breathe up to 17000 to 30000 or more times per day. So if you stay in the same environment where your air is hazardous it can be very bad for your lungs and heart. It can lead to difficulty breathing, heart disease and even cancer. So my design shows how air comes from the outside then gets blown into the filter which is made up of a piece of fabric more cotton than fabric again, then it is mostly safe to breathe because the cotton caught most of the bacteria and germs, while the fabric makes sure that the cotton doesn’t get blown away.” – Deea
“My prototype uses a microbial fuel cell to detect waste in the water. The bacteria in the water makes energy and the more energy created means the more bacteria is in the water. My prototype is unique because it’s simple and cheap to make. The dirty water would go inside the tank and there are positive and negative wires connected to a sensor that would tell us if the energy level is high meaning that water may be dangerous to drink. It is important to know because chemicals in the water can hurt your body and they can also get into the soil which will affect the plants and animals you may need” – Abigail
Challenge 4: Quality Education
Design a website that would help kids who can’t go to school learn new skills from home. This website could be a resource base that connects them to other services or provides them with lessons that they can explore on their own. The design is up to you!
Check out some of our student’s websites!
Kaitlyn: https://349041319.wixsite.com/website
Deea: https://sites.google.com/view/day-4-quality-education-deea/home
Luke: https://hockeykid1234.wixsite.com/mysite
Challenge 5: Responsible Production and Consumption
Create a series of posters that help to teach people how to live more sustainably and contribute towards a zero-waste lifestyle. You can either create your posters on paper or use a graphic design program like Canva.
Check out this awesome poster from a series that Deea made about reducing plastic use! Click on the following link to see the entire set: https://www.canva.com/design/DAD3GCuymwY/0486k6eOwFArXJKWAzPX7Q/view
And that concludes our week 1 #Design2030 Roundup! Thanks again to everyone who participated. We look forward to seeing the solutions to the worlds to-do list for the challenges in week 2!
Didn’t get a chance to participate? That’s ok, it’s not too late! Join in this week for some of our upcoming challenges. Follow the links below for more details.
The 4-7 Challenges: https://steamhub.ca/stem-minds-design2030-challenge/?fbclid=IwAR3NzOlzu18Zx1yiOqUnZSo4ffjrSI73lXCiTd3et_HOsdWCBZgvgFupnck
The 8-14 Challenges: