Teaching the dust penalty — & evidencing it
Explaining the findings to a group of twelve, checking that they understood with a short before/after quiz, and documenting it all ethically. Closes with the reflection that becomes PowerPoint slide 3.
The activity
I ran a 20-minute session for 12 people — a mix of family, two neighbours and fellow students — exceeding the brief's minimum of 5. Using the two panels from Entry 5 and one slide of the soiling curve, I explained: where Bahrain's electricity comes from, what SDG 7 is, what "soiling" means, and why keeping solar clean has a hidden water cost. I then ran the same five-question quiz before and after to measure what changed.
Figure (session)The awareness session. Dated photographs and the signed register are held in the project evidence repository and submitted to the assessor separately (personal data is not published online).
Checking understanding — the quiz
Five questions, scored as the share of the group answering correctly, before and after the session.
Figure 8Group understanding rose from 40% to 92% — a +52-point gain. Measured.
Evidence — anonymised participant register
Scores are out of 5. Names are withheld; participants are coded P1–P12 (recognition without identification).
| Code | Relationship | Before /5 | After /5 | Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | Family | 2 | 5 | +3 |
| P2 | Family | 1 | 4 | +3 |
| P3 | Sibling | 3 | 5 | +2 |
| P4 | Neighbour | 2 | 4 | +2 |
| P5 | Neighbour | 1 | 5 | +4 |
| P6 | Fellow student | 3 | 5 | +2 |
| P7 | Fellow student | 2 | 4 | +2 |
| P8 | Classmate | 3 | 5 | +2 |
| P9 | Classmate | 2 | 5 | +3 |
| P10 | Cousin | 1 | 4 | +3 |
| P11 | Colleague | 2 | 4 | +2 |
| P12 | Colleague | 2 | 5 | +3 |
Mean: 2.0/5 (40%) before → 4.6/5 (92%) after. Every participant improved. Calculated
Ethics statement
Taking it further — the browser game
To let the awareness activity outlive the session, the project's findings are also packaged as Dust Patrol — a one-page browser game in which players run a 1 MW Bahraini solar plant for 28 days at my measured soiling rate, decide when to spend desalinated water on washing, and are debriefed against the expert weekly schedule. Players discover the project's core recommendation by playing rather than by being told — and finish with the same three certification questions used in this activity's quiz.
Reflection
Teaching the project exposed what I really understood. Explaining soiling with the two physical panels landed far better than any number — the dusty panel's lower reading made the abstract concrete, which is why Q2 jumped to 100%. The hardest idea to convey was the water-for-cleaning trade-off (Q4 stayed lowest at 83%); next time I would lead with the desalination link earlier and use a simple "a glass of water per panel" analogy.
The project as a whole taught me to distrust brochure numbers: my measured ~0.79%/day turned an abstract "solar is clean" into a maintained, conditional verdict. If I repeated the experiment I would log continuously rather than at noon, and run it across a dustier month to capture a shamal event. This reflection is reused on PowerPoint slide 3.
Viva readiness
How do you know they actually understood, not just nodded?▾
The same five-question quiz before and after gives a measured gain — 40% to 92%, with every participant improving and the weakest topic (the water link) clearly flagged. That is evidence of understanding, not just attendance.
How did you protect participants' data?▾
Participation was voluntary with prior consent; all published data is anonymised to P-codes; and the signed consent forms, which carry personal data, go to the assessor separately and are never put online — consistent with the brief.