Week 2 Blog Entry

Reflection

For week 2, we were introduced to project ideation and literature review. For project ideation, we were asked to think of something that irritates us, makes our life easier or benefits our friends and family to start generating ideas for creating a device. After that, we chose interesting ideas from the past or current FYP students to help in our creativity and innovation. Next, we learnt about assessing our current research effectively with literature review through the use of SDL learning methods and meta-cognition model of thinking we have learnt in the module CP5202. 

Literature review helps us to examine the sources relevant to our research area and provide a critical evaluation and summary of them. The attributes of a good literature review include relevant and reliable sources, sources laying a strong foundation for our research topic, narrowing and eliminating irrelevant information, covering enough information required on a subject and lastly, striking a balance between sources supporting and opposing a particular aspect.

Meta-cognition Model of Thinking helps us to be aware of our own thinking, emotions, behavior, evaluating specific thinking skills and taking corrective actions when doing a literature review. When comparing different type of sources, it is important to find similarities and differences to be consistent with our research hypothesis and look for improvements. The most reliable source is peer-reviewed journals compared to taking sources from the internet search engines.

Planning stage for our first chemical device

We first had a brainstorming session as a team to gather ideas we have researched and after collecting and rejecting a lot of ideas, we narrowed down all our ideas into a theme: Environment. After we have confirmed our theme, we were in a slump from all the ideas we gathered as some were too complex. Thereafter, we decided on a problem we face on a daily basis to create a solution. 

The problem we want to solve is that the potted plants keep dying in our homes due to insufficient water or nutrients and the hassle to keep watering the plants ourselves. The solution we thought to solve this problem was to make a self-watering system for potted plants. The evaluation on our literature review can be seen from the table below.

Chemical Device: A self watering system for plants which also converts and purifies dirty household waste water to be used as a source of water to the plants.

References: 

1. Ali, S. and Khan, N. 2021. Delineation of mechanistic approaches employed by plant growth promoting microorganisms for improving drought stress tolerance in plants. Microbiological Research, 249, p.126771.

2. Chopparapu, R.T., Bala Chennaiah, M., Srivalli, G., Kartik Raju, S., Dileep Kumar, E., Sycam, V. and Dasari, R. (2020). Biodegradable polymer filter made from fiber composites for addition of minerals and salts to water. Materials Today: Proceedings, 33, pp.5607–5611.

3. Khiareddine, A., Ben Salah, C. and Mimouni, M.F. 2015. Power management of a photovoltaic/battery pumping system in agricultural experiment station. Solar Energy, 112, pp.319–338.

4. Kickstarter. n.d.. Botanium - Grow Edible Greens. Fast and Effortlessly. [online] Available at: <https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/158584247/botanium-grow-edible-greens-fast-and-effortlessly?ref=project_link> [Accessed 4 May 2021].

5. Plant care for Beginners. 2020. What is Leca and why is it useful for plants? [online] Available at: <https://plantcareforbeginners.com/articles/what-is-leca-why-useful-for-growing-plants> [Accessed 4 May 2021].