The Beginnings of my Capstone

I am working together with classmates Mika, Diana, and Yvette as well as a group of eight Los Arboles Middle School students to construct a cob bench in their outdoor classroom. Cob is a combination of sand, clay soil, water, and straw that can be used as a building material (Sample cob mixture pictured above). The materials are usually mixed outdoors by stomping on them. This is a bit of a nerve-wracking project because no one in our group has any experience in this type of construction. Of course, that is the same reason I was drawn to the cob bench project in the first place. After quite a bit of research, we may feel like cob experts right now, but I still feel ill-prepared for the real-life application of all this research. What I am most excited about is our assigned group of Los Arboles Middle School students. This group of students seems very excited to be working on this project with us; though they do seem a bit skeptical of us because we, as the CSUMB students, are supposed to be experts and we do not know what we are doing. It may be challenging to give the students clear instructions when we are also unsure if this project will work, but we seem to have a hardworking group of students. Overall, by the end of this project, I hope to have built some form of usable bench out of a cob material.