One of the assignments I did for this class involved working in a group with 4 of my classmates to come up with a idea or innovation for how to feed 9 billion people. During the initial stage of this project, our group worked together to pick a topic and then, we came up with a question that would be the driving force for our idea or innovation .The question we came up with was “how do we provide fresh produce for people living in communities with limited growing seasons?”. During the beginning phases of this project, we all picked what aspects of the challenge of feeding 9 billion people that we thought were the most influential or important and, one of the aspects that everyone in my group picked, was technology. So, the idea we picked to solve the question we came up with, dealt heavily with technology and that was, indoor or vertical farming. Our plan was to built indoor/vertical farms in remote communities in Canada who would normally have to fly in fresh produce. This way we would save the communities a lot of money in the long run and, we would reduce the carbon emissions produced by the planes. We came to this decision fairly unanimously and there was very little disagreement among the member’s of our group. After we had our question and solution established, we started working on the bulk of the project, which was to come up with a pitch for our idea that we would present to the other students in our class and other people who were involved with the class.

So, to prepare our idea for our final pitch presentation, we had to figure out: who this idea would effect and why it would be valuable, what we need to know and the resources we would need , a description of our idea and, a timeline and action plan for when and how we were going to implement this idea. Doing this took the majority of the time we had for the project and again, I think we worked fairly well together and each member of the group contributed to coming up with an answer for each of the questions above. That being said, working in a group was definitely one of the more interesting things about this assignment. I never really did any group work in SAIT, or in high school for that matter, so I think this might have been the first group project I’ve done since junior high. What I discovered was that each group member had their own unique talents and strengths, for instance: Alex was a great public speaker, McKenzie was good communicator and group manager, Dallen did good research, Kainan was a strong writer and, I was good with numbers.

When it came time to present our pitch idea, we all met at the school with the other groups and people who were involved with the class and, the first thing that I’m going to say is, I was extremely nervous and I could tell my group members were as well. One thing that I don’t think any of us were expecting, or at least I wasn’t, was the cameraman who was going to be filming the whole thing. We were the first group to present and overall, I think our presentation went well. After we finished presenting, we received a lot of questions from members of the other groups and something that I realized while listening to the questions the other groups had, was that while our groups idea was really ambitious and innovative, we were somewhat lacking in being able to, as one of our instructors Jay pointed out, being able to quantify our ideas and solutions. Things like not knowing exactly how much energy we needed and the price of the electricity.

Now, my role in the project was to find out what we needed to know to move ahead with this project and, I labelled myself as the “numbers guy”. So, I feel that I let me group down in this matter and it’s something I feel bad about. That being said, I was aware of the fact that there were some logistical issues with this project before we presented and, I should have included these numbers. I didn’t, and that’s why I feel that I am at fault for not making our presentation as strong as it could have been because, I actually did know how much electricity we needed and how much it would cost, I just forgot to put it in my script and I was too nervous to try and answer the question when it came up. Although there were some weaknesses with our presentation, we definitely had our strengths to. I think that our idea was very innovative, served a real need, and even though I think the technology we required was a little underdeveloped still, I would not be surprised at all if we saw an idea like this actually implemented in Canada. This is something that I mentioned during our presentation and, its that these farms become more viable every year and with each new development in renewable energy and lighting technology.

After we finished presenting, I got to watch the other groups present. and , I really enjoyed watching the other groups presentations and there were some really good ideas; however, one groups idea really stood out and I was really impressed by their presentation. Their idea was similar to ours, in that it also included vertical farming and indoor farming but unlike our idea, there solution involved using indoor and vertical farming as a way to feed people on a global scale. It also included a really revolutionary idea that I found to be very interesting and that was, incorporating insects into vertical farms and indoor farms as an additional food source.

Overall, this assignment taught me a lot about working with a group, narrowing down ideas, presenting ideas, evaluating ideas and,  taking an idea from the stage where it’s just an idea and making into something that has real world values and applications. These are definitely important skills to have when trying to solve global problems like, feeding 9 billion people.