Mission Topic

Are you interested in competitive sports? Have you ever been on a school sports team? We are trying to get the students at our middle school be able to experience the excitement of competitive sports and middle school sports teams. Our mission topic this year is improving the intramurals at our middle school. We want to turn the intramural program interscholastic so the sports could become more competitive. The purpose of this mission is to get the students motivated to work towards goals and so students can get more involved with the school. Also, it will help the community develop a better reputation with our school. However, we need the approval from city council to be able to improve the intramurals. If we get the approval from city council, then the students will be more motivated to work towards goals and the community will develop a better reputation with our school.

Real World Skills I’ve Learned

I learned many skills throughout working in the mission. One of the greatest skills I learned was communication. I had to talk to various people on the phone and through email while working on the mission. This will help me be able to communicate with others when I’m a professional. Another skill I learned was patience. I had to use patience while talking on the phone. Some of the times, explaining what we were trying to do on the phone got aggravating. I had to use patience to calm myself down instead of getting extremely angry at the people on the other line. Persistence was another skill I learned and had to use. I had to use persistence to get approval from the other restaurants and shops. If I didn’t use persistence then the restaurants and the shops might have not agreed as easily. The last skill I learned was working with others. This is a very important skill that I learned because when you’re working in a group it’s a team effort, not your individual effort. I used working with others to agree on our next steps with our project.

Challenges We Encountered

There were a few challenges that we encountered during our mission. Our first challenge was to try to find what we needed to be able to improve the intramurals. We figured out that we needed to get city council on board. However, we can’t get their approval without having enough support from students, teachers, and community members.
The only way to get support from the students, teachers, and community members is to create survey’s and pledges for them to complete so we could  get the feedback and support that we needed. Also, we needed to find how to get the pledges distributed. This was hard because we couldn’t figure out how the community members would be able to get the pledges back to us. We decided that it was best to have restaurants and shops hold the pledges throughout our community because it would be easier for the community members to fill out and it would be easier for us to collect. Then  we faced another challenge to get restaurants and shops in our community to get on board with having the pledges be placed in their shop or restaurant. We needed this to be able to get the community members feedback.  Our last challenge was finding grants to get money. There are not many grants that allow students to apply so it’s very difficult to find grants online.

Solutions We tried

We tried various solutions to solve our challenges. The first solution we thought of was creating pledges for teachers and community members so we could get their support. Then we created surveys for the students to get their feedback on what they thought of intramurals. Next we created a solution to be able to pass out the pledges to the community members. We called and emailed many local restaurant and shop owners to see if we could have the pledges be placed in their restaurant or shop for community members to fill out. Also, we talked to Mr. Sonada, head of intramurals, to see what was needed in order to get city councils support. Finally, we needed to figure out how to get the money to fund intramurals. A local frozen yogurt place called Crave offered to host a fundraiser. This could maybe help with some funding issues if we can’t find a grant.

Next Steps

There are a few next steps we have to complete. Our first step is to deliver the pledges to the restaurants and shops. We need to do this step so the community can give us the support and feedback we need for our data. Next, we have to deliver the pledges to the teachers at our middle school and pass out the surveys to the students. We need this step to get their support and feedback for even more data.  Then we will need to have the fundraiser at Crave, to get money for the mission. If all of this goes as planned then our final step is to present this to city council to get their approval. If we get their approval then there are many new steps to face to start improving the intramurals.

Favorite part of the process

There were many favorite parts of doing this mission. One of my favorite parts was communicating through email and through telephone to talk to the restaurants and shops. I liked this because it made me feel like I was in the real world. It felt like I was grown up and I actually had a real job. Another favorite part was working with others. I liked working with others because we discussed how to overcome the challenges as a team. Also, I liked how everyone had their share of the work they needed to complete. It made me feel more independent instead of always depending on others.