Team:Exeter/Notebook/July27
Monday, 27 July
Science Communication and Outreach
We published a questionnaire on social media to gather anonymous feedback from the public about their perception of our project. We did this because we wanted to ensure that our outreach and infographics so far had explained our project clearly and answered any questions people might have.
We got 36 responses. 91.67% of respondents described their thoughts on our project as positive and all other respondents were neutral (nobody described their thoughts on our project as negative). We asked people to share any concerns and got some very helpful responses; respondents brought up the following issues:
- People were concerned about the safety of using genetically modified organisms, and wanted to know how we would prevent the release of GMOs into the environment
- People wanted to know more about the impact of 'artificial coral' on the reef ecosystem. One person mentioned that some people might have moral concerns about interfering with nature.
- Lots of responses questioned the economic viability & costs of our project
- Some respondents brought up the idea that our project, which aims to reduce the carbon footprint of CaCO3 manufacturing, might induce environmental complacency in industries which use CaCO3 (many of which are large scale carbon-emitters)
Hydrogels and Modelling
Pazzy found that there were two types of experiment that were typically performed in the lab on viscoelastic materials in order to determine which physical model was better. As a similar idea to this approach, he started coding a numerical differential equation solver that could produce a plot of stress or strain on the hydrogel as the output.