"Mite" This Help Bees?

Teaming and Communication:

 

First, we conducted research on our problem.  Next, one member of the team set our website’s foundation, while the other members worked on charts and specific paragraph tasks.  Then, we each drafted a design for our combatant to the plague of the Varroa mite, so that we could compare and combine the designs.  We requested several reviews from our technical advisor, and, when we had enough information, we emailed a second scientist advisor for input.  During this process, we ensured that we had the support of our independent study school, our teacher, and a mentor, who provided reviews and advice.    

 

 

 

Research and Innovation:

 

The staggering amount of information on the internet made it challenging at first to decide which sites were the most reliable and then to figure out how to bring all of the information together so that it made sense!  Also, when researching other communities, we saw that many previous solutions were having problems.  It was exciting but daunting, knowing that we needed to invent something new.  We realized that doing so much detailed research on bees and mites was essential to innovating our solution.  Trying to solve a real problem is educational and fun, because it “mite” actually make a difference!

 

 

 

Three Lessons Learned During the Program:

 

1. Our team learned that sometimes it's better to step away from a project when you've been working on it for a long time and are starting to get frustrated with it.  This way, heads can get cleared and get ready to refocus.  We had to be willing to come back to the project and tackle it again.  This was especially true when we were trying to think of a new design idea that we thought would work.  

2. We learned that when working on a project that requires researching facts, we needed to get many different resources to make sure that the information was consistent.  If the information was not consistent, we needed to determine which sources were most reliable and even check with other resources.  Also, having many resources gave us much more information and many more different perspectives than we would have gotten from just one resource.  While this made our project better, we also needed to learn how to organize all of the different information in a way that made sense to people reading it.  So we also found that it was helpful to have someone who didn't have any knowledge of our topic look at our work to see if it was understandable.  You may think that your work or designs are clear, but they may seem confusing to another person. 

3. We learned to work within a certain direct, exact, template, such as the one given for this program.  We were used to more loose requirements, so it was an interesting exercise in fitting our ideas into a specific format.  We needed to pay very close attention to detail.