*STUDENT BLOG BY AMY WHITE*
Creating the material for the Dimond park pet waste activity was very difficult for two reasons. One challenge was finding the information to piece together games and materials that we could use to educate the community. The other challenge, which wasn’t as difficult, was collaborating with other team mates to agree and make group decisions. Information gathering is tough mainly due to the fact that there’s a lot of untrustworthy websites with false information or unrealistic numbers that you can potentially run into online. Thankfully, most of the websites that we looked at were accurate. For example, we relied a lot on the Friends of Sausal Creek website and government-funded websites that have reputable data. After we found the information, we had to figure out how to write more scientific questions in words that the general population could understand. This was maybe the most stressful part because not everyone knows technical words like Escherichia coli. Everyone in my group was very resourceful, very responsible, and we got the job done. Making sure we all stayed focused and got the challenging work done was important, but it was a lot of fun.
One thing I definitely had fun with was leading the activity. Basically, we set up a game where there were two wrong answers and one right one; participants had to throw the ball into the right answer and if they were right they got a reward. I was helping to run this game on the day of the event and I felt like a leader, although everyone was a leader of some sort on that day. One thing that was really difficult for me was to not get frustrated when people didn’t want to participate in the game. It was hard for all of us at first to walk up to other people and say “would you like to play our game” but I got used to it. Other than that, the activity part of the day for sure was a lot of fun and I enjoyed it quite a bit.
One thing that I would do differently, however, was the way we set up the game. I think a lot of people would have enjoyed the game more or as much as we thought if we made it easier. Some people had no idea how to play the game and most people just didn’t have time that day. Although, to be frank, a lot of the participants were children and I’m glad they had the chance to learn something. As for asking people to do the surveys, most people agreed to participate. There was one person who didn’t do a survey and that was just because they didn’t want to but overall it was a very successful outreach day.