The Presentations
The end of our praxis lab included a presentation of all of the praxis labs and scholar groups in one night. They were short 10 minute presentations, so Ashley and I had 30 seconds each to talk about our new website. I've already posted about the projects in our own praxis lab, but now I want to tell you what all of the other praxis labs and scholar groups that I heard about have done during this year!
Air Quality: This is really an amazing group of students! I was very impressed by the work that they've done this year. They worked very closely with business and legislature to help improve the air quality in the valley. Their large project was creating a video to be screened in elementary schools so that kids will learn about improving air quality at a much younger age. The video personified a harmful air particle to help educate the youth on why he is harmful to them. They hope to show this film in elementary schools, and are still working on making agreements with businesses and the legislature to stop the awful pollution that occurs every winter in the valley.
Redefining Health and Wellness: This lab worked on redefining what health and wellness means to college age individuals. They did a lot of research during the first semester of this year and then came up with a project to do for the second semester. The project that they came up with is to put on a cooking class for students on campus. They decided to make it a "lab class" for one of the introductory nutrition classes here on campus. The purpose was to redefine what it means to be healthy for people our age, and to help them learn how to cook! Most people who took the class had expressed that they had never cooked before, but some had. There were even some culinary students who took the course, but they said that they learned new things during the course anyways. This is because they incorporated the seven fundamentals of wellness into every week with the dish they were cooking! I thought that it was an extremely unique approach to wellness and I was thrilled with it!
Drone Group: I don't actually remember the name of this scholars group. I thought that the project was really interesting, but morally I'm not sure if I agreed with it. The group worked on a drone that would help herd cattle on a ranch in Australia and I'm assuming elsewhere. The benefits of this project were that 7 people usually die every year on a cattle drive because of the helicopter and not being able to get out of the way. Also, the herding of cattle would take WAY less time with the use of a drone, but I struggled with the fact that people would be out of jobs. I also struggled with the idea that even more cattle would be slaughtered. I'm no vegetarian but I feel that there is probably enough meat produced every year, and maybe even more than enough because it doesn't all get sold. I'm not sure if maximizing the product for this particular industry is justified. Presumably I think NOT. I was slightly disappointed with this group because of these reasons, and even though it is a cool project I'm not sure that I agree with it.
