The forum is completed and we felt that it had offered us another way to get our message out. We talked directly to some adults and teachers that had kids. Many of them looked shocked by what lead poisoning could cause and voiced that they were thankful that we had informed them. We wanted our presentation to be engaging so we set up a game where there were 8 items and those items had to be sorted into two categories. One category were for those items that contained led and the other was for the items that did not contain led. We had them play our game as the first thing they did when coming to look at our project. This way they were intrigued and we could also tell if they had prior knowledge and could base our oral presentation on their level of prior knowledge.
This week we have completed our big idea. We have spoken at the Grandview Elementary all school assembly and completed our poster. Our speech was brief and informative just like our poster, it basically covered the same material that our poster did. Many parents came up to us after our speech and told us that it was very informative. We were also approached by a faculty member to talk about testing their pipes for lead. Our solution is implemented and we feel that we have made an impact.
We are combining our two previous ideas into one big idea. We are working with Grandview elementary and speaking with Principal Ortiz, trying to figure out how we can get information out to his students. In addition to that, we have contacted Eric and he has responded and agreed to tweet out our poster and the link to our survey. The Twitter portion of our project is what will be sustainable, and the answers to our survey questions are what will be measurable. What we will continue to work on is getting other people/schools to tweet out our poster.
Eric has uploaded our poster and survey onto his Twitter page and we have already received some survey responses. Unfortunately, we still need more survey responses than what we are already getting. It was still a step forward though to have a teacher show his support for our project. It is Friday, we currently have gotten 35 survey responses! And this is just a start to getting the word out about our poster and survey. Although, some people may say that raising awareness is easy and a simple thing to complete in three weeks, it is actually the first step of starting something big and the first step to helping people understand the importance of why Lead Poisoning should be something to pay attention to. It is especially important for us, the Lead Poisoning group, to raise awareness because this disease is not as well known as a disease such as Cancer or Allergies. This week we have decided to spread awareness about lead poisoning in children. Our idea is to create a poster which includes information about causes, symptoms, lasting effects, and what can be done to test whether you have it. We want to work on spreading awareness specifically towards parents, because our goal is for them to request lead blood tests when taking their children in for their regular doctor appointments. After someone sees our poster we want them to take a survey that asks a few simple questions about their knowledge of lead poisoning prior to reading our poster and after reading our poster. In order for our idea to work, we need a group of parents to speak with and share our poster with. We are trying to figure out how we can work with a group of parents from Grandview Elementary. We have contacted someone at their school and are planning on trying to speak at their upcoming assembly. Our ideas have been growing and changing each week and will continue to grow and change.
This week our group has chosen to narrow the broad topic of Lead Poisoning down to a more specific issue of Lead Poisoning specializing in children. Our main motivations for deciding to focus on youth lead exposure are because it is more common in children in comparison to adults, children absorb lead more easily, and since children’s immune systems are not as strong the amount of lead their body can tolerate is much smaller than people who are older.
Since we have 5 weeks to complete our project we are going to narrow down our focus even further. We are planning on focusing on informing parents why they should request for their children to get their blood levels tested for poisonous metal whenever they go in to the doctor. We want to create an informational poster that is clear and concise. Instead of just posting it around town, we want to ask UCLA and other colleges and people to post our poster on social media. We are hoping that this would gain support because of how credible the colleges are. To tell the story of how our group came to be, we have to go back to before spring break. We talked about which disease was the most interesting to us. We decided on Lead Poisoning after it piqued all of our interests and because of the recent water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
A main reason why our group chose to focus our project on Lead Poisoning was because we felt it was a pressing issue that not many are aware of. Unlike some of the more commonly known non-infectious diseases, Lead Poisoning can develop throughout any point in your life. It doesn’t currently have many treatment options, because there is minimal research. We hope to make an impact on not only our community, but the world with our project. We are all very eager to do further research about this topic and are excited to see what we can accomplish. |
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