Week 9: Are you willing to take the Challenge?

           During the Honors Colloquium Course, students had to participate in group projects called Challenge Group Projects.  We had to group up with other students in the class to work together collaboratively as a cohesive team in order complete the project.  The project consisted of teaching the class about the "challenges" or issues presented in a specific chapter of the book Plan B.  My challenge group consisted of fellow classmates, Shannon, Gretchen, and Myself.  We had to thoroughly read the chapter, propose solutions and conduct research as well as put a thoughtful presentation together to fully understand the issues in the chapter and make sure that the class understands and gets a full synopsis of what the chapter has to offer.  Our chapter incorporated three main issues of Chapter 2: Population Pressure: Land and Water.  First, overpopulation leads to more demand for food which leads to overuse of land for crops and soil erosion. Another issue from our chapter is so much stress on grain dependability has decreased the water supply.  The final issue included the elimination of aquifers and cutbacks of crop production could come at the same time. 

            It was a fun experience to teach the class about our particular issue and show our classmates what we researched and worked hard on.  It was also particularly interesting to see the concepts that the other groups had worked on for their challenge group presentations.  I liked learning about the other chapters and seeing the similarities and differences between the different groups methods of presenting.  On our guidelines, Professor Wilkinson suggested that we try to incorporate some sort of humor for comic relief and Saksham, Jessel, and Andrea's group did that successfully and kept the group entertained and alert.  I feel that this project gave us the opportunity to further learn about sustainability, the government roles, social, political, and economic perspectives as well as what we can do as individuals to improve our environment and achieve sustainability.