High-Level Project Summary
More frequent and intense drought, storms, heat waves, rising sea levels, melting glaciers and warming oceans can directly harm animals, destroy the places they live, and wreak havoc on people's livelihoods and communities. As climate change worsens, dangerous weather events are becoming more frequent or severe. We have made a short video that provides factual and educational information about climate change based on the United Arab Emirates. We have included a lot of details including how it affects us, and all of the major strategies and initiatives taken up by the government of UAE to tackle climate change to make the Earth a greener home for us and our children.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Our project mainly focuses on climate change in the region we live in - Dubai, UAE. This highly developed country is keen on using advanced technology and keeping majority of the entertainment and work facilities indoors. Malls, recreation parks and buildings are constantly air-conditioned with little to no power outage.
Why are all these measures taken by the country? Considering the fact that the climate tends to stretch beyond 50 degree Celsius certain years, it is highly inconvenient for the residents to be moving around in the scorching heat, especially during the months of April-September. The country is continuously finding ways to alter the climate to better suit vegetation and human needs. Not only does the country focus on change of climate, but also reducing the emission of greenhouse gases as it causes a predicament in the whole world.
Our video gives a vast idea on the struggles of the UAE in climate change and their way of fixing this solution. For people who are unaware about the climatic conditions faced by this region of the world, this video will help explain the life of citizens that have been living in this country for years, and how we have seen progress in UAE's efforts in climate change.
We hope to help people gain clarity on the topic of climate change and how extensive the conversation about climate change is. Climate change does not only speak about global warming or hotter summers, it also focuses on how countries hope to adjust their climate for their good, something that is generally unheard of.
Our project includes the use of PowerPoint, a voiceover to explain the content and our personal connection to it and an editing software called VN to help collate this video together
Space Agency Data
We have been inspired by data from the NASA Space Agency and have incorporated data from the UAE government for our project.
Hackathon Journey
A team of five of us decided to make a team and focus on a topic that had a personal connection to us. Us students from GMA formed the team "Earthlings", as a representation of our relation to this world. As we have our exams coming up, we were on a tight schedule to complete this challenge. However, we were keen and determined and wanted to shed light on our input on climate change and how it has affected us personally no matter the time it took. We stayed in school after hours to work on our thoughts and ideas, to complete the research for our video, and to formulate ways in which we could make this project the best possible.
This group of people was not the closest before this project. We had barely spoken and were thrown into this challenge together, expected to create something that represents this country we live in. And so we did. We bonded incredibly and learnt about time management, teamwork. Some qualities you make think are very repetitive but they only strike you when you have a reason to use them. Using all the free time we had in school, finding time away from our busy days at home to hop onto zoom meetings to plan and make this video happen. And it did happen. After much determination and hard work, we were successful in making a product that we were proud of, something we wanted to portray to the world and we did.
Since none of us had time at home together, we figured the best way to complete this was face-to-face, after school hours. We used that time to make a structured plan and divide our work evenly so we can work on it ourselves during our own free time. At times, we had to even stay up late during a school night to meet a certain deadline we had set for ourselves. We used the guidance of our Computer and Design teachers and asked them for any improvements we could make on the project. None of us being professionals at video making, we needed time and patience to even get the basics done. But we made sure we did it.
We wanted to clear the misconception about climate change and how it goes much more than ice melting. The world is unaware of the effects of climate change in the positive in places like Dubai and we were keen on making people aware about it. Thus was the inspiration for our project. To introduce to people something new and different than what they may have heard and experienced.
We would like to thank our IT teachers for helping us tremendously during this challenge, guiding us and motivating us and suggesting ideas as to how we can improve our video. Without their help, we would have no way in a million years been able to complete this.
References
Tags
#saveearth, #gogreen, #climatechange, #uae, #dubai