During the beginning of the lab, our team researched different requirements that are vital to a Betta fish's habitat. We are researching this to determine how we are going to create a habitat for the fish, as well as determine what factors we should make students consider when they are doing our project. We found that the fish prefers slightly acidic and warm water. They must live in isolation because they are very aggressive and will harm any other fish that it lives with. Another thing we found is that they prefer hiding, so their habitat must include different caves or other various hiding places.
After discussing our proposal with the instructors, our project was changed a bit. Our original idea was creating a lab manual for an entire term. The professor explained how that would be too much work to create a manual of that magnitude in 10 weeks. Instead, he suggested that we have a semester plan, but only write a manual for a specific task in the project. Since our project is making a self-sustaining fish tank, each component of the self-sustaining aspect will be a different segment of the term. The different components include: a basic fish tank environment for a specific fish with self-filtering hydroponic plants, a self-feeder, and a back-up filtering system. The last week of this term would be used to present each student's specific part and incorporate it into the the fish tank itself.
We decided to make a the lab manual specific to the self-feeder part of the project. We chose this because it was one of the more "engineering-geared" aspects of the project. We will then run the lab manual that we create to make sure that it is feasible for a student to complete, in the time that we have allotted for it. We will then adjust the lab manual with what we discover based on running it, locating trouble points, and adjusting time frames accordingly.
This week was mainly spent finalizing our project idea and adjusting our proposal to account for these changes. Our time frame is delayed a little bit because of the extension of the proposal. but we are also researching how to create a self-feeder and what materials we will need to create it to push through this minor setback.
Next week, our goal is to design the feeder and order all of the materials necessary to build the feeder. Also, we will allot time next week to take official head shots of each member of the team for the blog.