Second week of Introduction to Chemical Product Design.
26 April 2021
Welcome to this week's documentation! This week, we had learnt many important things about finding relevant sources for our chemical devices that we had ideated during the first lesson of the week. At first, it was difficult coming out with a chemical device to solve a common problem but as time carried on, it became easier to ideate on different chemical devices that can help our lives become easier. We also learnt evaluation on sources which is used to find out the credibility of the sources such as finding out their similarities by using a literature review template.
First lesson of the week
Firstly, during the first part of the lesson, we were asked by Mr Ting to think of something that irritates you, something that makes your life easier and something that helps you or your neighbours. So we thought about pests that invade our houses which is very irritating. Afterwards, we had to think about a sort of chemical device that uses the chemical engineering principles that can solve this problem. Instead of repelling the pests as there are already many devices out there for repelling pests, we thought of attracting the pests instead, to their doom. However, during the ideation process, we had a difficult time coming out with a chemical engineering principle that can be used in this chemical device. Hence, Mr Ting came to the rescue by giving us different topics that were used in past years Final Year Projects also known as FYP. One of the topics that had intrigued our group was "a perfectly hot brewed coffee machine". Instead of a hot brewed coffee, our group decided to research more on cold brew coffee instead, as they are less hot to the tongue and that there are not many coffee machines for that. And from then on, we embarked on our journey to find relevant sources for our idea, which is a perfectly cold-brewed coffee machine.
Literature Review
Before I start ranting of about literature review, allow me to enlighten you on its definition.
Literature Review refers to the survey of books and articles to provide a critical evaluation and summary relevant to your research area by critically analysing the information gathered by identifying gaps in our current knowledge and formulate areas for further research and reviewing area of controversy.
It is important to conduct literature review because it provides a current assessment towards the state of a topic. This will allow a researcher to determine the state of the project by seeing what is known on the topic and how extensively it has been researched. Additionally, conducting a literature review will allow us to identify which researcher has written the most on the topic and are most likely to be considered experts on the topic which can help boost our field of study as we have credible and reliable resources for reference and consultation. Lastly, conducting literature reviews will help us steer clear of plagiarism intentionally or not. By conducting a literature review, it will allow us to identify what has been said, done or published in the certain field of study and this will protect us from any sort of plagiarism which is a criminal offence. Hence, conducting a literature review is important as it allows us to be better informed on the status of the project, help us find credible sources and help us to avoid plagiarism.
When conducting a literature review, there are some key points that are essential to ensure that one's review is good and of high quality.
Firstly, one must ensure that the sources that they derived from is both accurate and relevant since there might be fake information on the web.
Secondly, the scope of the information must be narrow and specific to remove any irrelevant and unnecessary information.
Thirdly, the source used should have enough information to cover the entire topic that is required during the research.
Lastly, there must be a balance between the source obtained that supports and opposes the research to prevent any biased research and to ensure the integrity of the research done.
Here’s how we are going to evaluate our sources. We have
decided on using the meta-cognition model of thinking. To put it simply, we are
going to be aware of our own thinking, emotions, feelings and behaviour. The
meta-cognition model of thinking contains 5 parts which are going to help us
evaluate our sources, analysis, comparison and contrast, inference and
interpretation, generating possibilities and evaluation.
Analysis for us means that firstly we would be identifying a
few things about the source. Firstly the type of research, whether if it’s a peer-reviewed
article or maybe a journal. Secondly the authors of the source, who are they
and if they have expertise in this field of research. Thirdly, we are going to
evaluate the methodology of the research, what kind of methods they are using
and what results come from that form of research. Fourthly, we are going to
look at the currency of the research and see how recent is the information and
data. Finally, we have to identify the main research questions, finding the
main research question we help us see if this research is relevant to help us.
Comparison and contrast will be after where we will look at
the sources we have and see if there is anything similar or different about the
sources. If the sources are similar, it might mean that the sources are
reliable and if not we have to look in deeper and see how the research is done
and then determine of if the sources are helpful or not. Nonetheless,
identifying both similarities and differences are important as similarities can
show support for our hypotheses while differences may present new research gaps
that we have to fill.
Inference and interpretation has a few components to it,
firstly, we have to separate the facts from opinions in the research that we
have found. This will be important to us as facts are real while the author’s
opinions are not backed by research thus using the author’s opinion we not be
the best. Secondly we have to make meaning from the data, for example if a research
shows that plastic waste would fill up all the landfills by 2040, the data
tells us that we have to find a solution to the plastic pollution problem. Thirdly,
we have to identify major findings and make connections between resources, this
ties back to the preview step of comparison and contrast but now we are using
the key findings instead.
Generating possibilities means to generate as many possibilities
using the information gathered from our research and trying to generate many
different types as well. At this stage any sort of idea is welcome for us and
we would filter the improbable ones later on.
Evaluation of a source refers to the process where one critically evaluates sources to determine if the information used is appropriate for the research. This process requires us to identify the appropriate criteria needed for evaluation and prioritize the importance of certain criteria when applying it into our research. These criteria will help play a part in the decision-making process.
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