Manatee Rescue

  • Location
    Aguadilla, Puerto Rico
  • Status
    Active

The Problem

Manateam is a group of three eighth-grade students from Ramey Unit School, DoDEA, located in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. Our group wants this project to create a ripple effect in our community and for the manatees. When our team conducted our experiment, we wished for individuals to be impacted in a way that would help researchers as well as manatees. We want individuals who participated in our testings to learn how to effectively report an injured manatee. Our mission is to reach out to protect the West Indian manatees of Puerto Rico. We facilitated this by spreading awareness through informational and interactive guideposts in the northwest beaches of Puerto Rico. Our goal is is to preserve and protect the West Indian manatee in Puerto Rico by designing and constructing the guideposts which will display the necessary criteria to report a beached manatee. During the course of this experiment, Manateam ensured that the prototypes were to have an impact on the manatee population in Puerto Rico. By enabling this, we collected data from the informational seminar conducted by Manateam. This allowed our team to stage an actual scene at the beach in the library. By implementing our signs on beaches, we hope that community members and tourists learn how to report an injured or beached manatee, which will provide researchers with accurate data about why the manatees are dying. We then hope that from there, the manatee population will increase due to the greater amount of reliable data.

Our Plan

We designed, improved, and built our prototype over the course of several class days. We created three prototypes, due to the mistakes and data errors in our first trial. First, we utilized an orange poster paper and placed our original title, “Manatees”, in the middle of the poster. Then, we placed an image a manatee on the bottom left corner of the poster. In addition, we added the four steps on the left hand side of the poster, but as the rule were written they stretched from one side to the other. Furthermore, we also attached the main ideas of our team across the right border of the base of the poster. Our final stage for this poster was to place the location of the beach to the right of the manatee’s image. For our second sign, we engaged in a different route for the visual aspect of the poster. Although the content of the guidepost would be in a different order, the poster was still pigmented orange. We first placed our title onto the upper right border of the poster. Subsequently, we then placed the manatee’s picture in the upper left hand corner, to better capture the attention of individuals. We positioned the four steps in the center of the poster, and changed the location box on the bottom left hand side of the poster. Our final step for this poster was to place the team’s miniature abstract on the bottom right hand side. After we conducted our experiment, we registered that neither of our first two prototypes were successful due to the fact that they didn’t meet our objective: to educate individuals of the steps to follow in order to assist an injured or beached manatee. By utilizing Google Presentation, our new and final prototype was able to appear professional. Our first step into designing the new poster, consisted of creating a new, yet more effective title. With the help of our Team Advisor, we developed a title that fit the criteria of our prototype and project. We placed our title towards the upper right side of the poster, followed by the subtitle centered in the center of the sign. We then placed the image of the manatee on the upper right hand corner of the sign, which seemed to capture the attention of the audience more so than it being on the base of the poster. Our abstract, was kept at the bottom base of the poster. After the three steps were completed, we shortened the length of the four steps to follow and placed them in the center of the sign, starting on the right but stretching across in order for it to capture more attention. Our last step in completing our final prototype, we added a picture of the island, and provided an arrow in which pointed towards the location of the sign, onto the bottom left hand corner.

Themes Addressed

  • term icon
    Wildlife

The Benefit

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