Know Your Rights

As a consumer, it is very important to know your rights. Your job as a consumer is to know your rights to ensure that you do not buy a faulty product, pay more than you intend to. There are many rules and regulations regarding products. The Fair Trading Act is an exceptional example of this, it protects consumers from purchasing faulty or falsely advertised products, it also protects consumers when they have purchased a faulty product. For example, if you buy a desk with a missing drawer, if it fits the policy, you have the right to get a full refund or another model of the same desk. If the producer refuses to do this then you have the right to take them to court or report them, unless it states in their policy that they do not accept refunds or swaps. Knowing your rights as a consumer can protect you from any problems with producers in the future.

The Rights Of Consumers and Responsibility Of Producers

The fair trading act protects consumers from misleading or deceptive behaviour from traders.
The act protects consumers from false claims about what the product is. It deals with unfair contract terms,
product safety and even where it comes from. The Commerce Commission also deals with sales and promotion. The Commerce Commission's main goal is to play their part in ensuring that markets work
properly so consumers and businesses are confident in the marketplace. The consumer is responsible for
the act, if the act isn’t being followed, the consumers can also take their own legal action. But the act applies
to both the producers and consumers. If there is misleading or deceptive behaviour being shown by the
producers, the consumers will be protected by the Fair Trading Act.

The Act of Compliance of obligations applies to both the consumers and the producers. However, the obligation does not apply to consumers that intend to get a refund after they deliberately used it all up or ruined it in some way. On the other hand, if you buy a faulty product and try to return it, it is the producer's obligation to either refund the product or give you the same model of the product. In most cases, stores have a returns policy, and if the policy doesn’t apply to the product, you are not protected by the policy. The producers must put their feet in the shoes of the consumers. The business would have to consider the consumers and what they would want and how they would want it to be presented. The commission's job is to investigate the allegations of a producer and to enforce the Fair Trading Act. In conclusion, the Act of Compliance of obligations applies to both the producers and consumers in different ways.

When reporting a business you can go to a range of different sites such as https://comcom.govt.nz and report a business through their complaint form or you could call them through this phone number, 0800 943 600 or email contact@comcom.govt.nz with your concerns about a certain business or producer.

Is it illegal to do this, we're talking about killing pests here...

Ok so maybe I exaggerated in the title, but can you blame me? We were figuring out ways to kill pests. This week marks the start of our Business and Enterprise unit. Our class has been working on projects focused around innovating environmental issues that New Zealand is currently facing. For the past few weeks we have been doing a project that required us to use investigative research and practical knowledge of science, technology and business to design and prototype a solution to the challenge. Doing this project required us to use our Science, Technology, Social Science and English skills to get the best product we could. 


At the start of this process, we divided our class into teams of four. I worked with Molly, Jess and Connor. Then Mr Carter gave out pieces of paper with the different challenges on them. Our group decided to do the Protection from Pests challenge. At first, our group had a hard time choosing the challenge because we had to consider how challenging they were. At the start, I wanted to do the Careers and Capability challenge which was coming up with a way to encourage youth to do more agricultural work. But then my group pointed out that it might be too challenging, which I didn't agree with but then we agreed on doing the Protection from Pests challenge. Our challenge was to create a way to improve New Zealand’s biosecurity and protect the country from harmful invasions of plant and animal pests. We thought that this challenge was challenging enough. Our group decided to do this challenge because we wanted to do something challenging. This challenge seemed like something that our group could all add something to.

The next thing we did was research, now at the start, we focused our research on plants that could cause potential harm to the country. But this didn't really get us anywhere because it didn't impact our final product. But then we started to realise that we had to look at pests of animal form. We started to investigate how pests are currently taken care of, most of it was poisoning. This information helps us figure out how we were going to innovate the way that pests are taken care of. Once we finished researching the way pests were taken care of, we went on to research robots and how they could potentially help us create a product. 

After this, we started to choose our enablers. Enablers are the main things that are going to be incorporated in the product. This part was challenging for our group because we weren't really sure what we wanted to make at that point. But we did research further into the enablers and found the ones that would best suit our challenge and final product. The challenging part of this task was actually only choosing two, our group had so many ideas that it was so hard to choose only two enablers. In the end, our group decided to use Stem Cell Science and Robots, I'm glad we chose these enablers because they worked out really good in the final product. 

Once we chose our enablers, our next challenge was to brainstorm ideas. This part was my favourite because we got to use our creativity to come up with a product. Our group was great at creating ideas for our product. This task was where our group worked as a team the most, we were all contributing and putting our ideas forward. Our first ideas were to create nanotechnology that can go through inanimate objects and scan through the bacteria and make the right decision about whether the bacteria should be there or not. Another idea was to build another robot prototype for the airports. They would have been able to scan bags as well as people as they walk through a programmed gate, the gate also would have scanned for bacteria and other banned substances. We had another idea that included building robots that looked like pests that could gather information about the pest and its behaviour. We decided on another idea, Olaf… Olaf is an acronym for Opposing, Living pests, Attacking, Functional, Structures. Olaf is a small robot that would be able to manoeuvre around the forestry in New Zealand. There would be multiple robots around the Country, specifically where native animals are, and there would be charging stations hidden so the robots would get enough charge to last as long as it needs. There would also be control towers placed around the country allowing information about the pests to be put on a database on every pest. The simple design would have 6 micro cameras that will scan and get more information on that pest and it will send it back. We will then study what is the weakness and strengths so that we will know how to attack and take down the pest. It was hard to incorporate the enablers into Olaf, but we managed to do it. Using stem cell science we will be able to create a database full of bacteria found in pests and harmful plants. This database will then allow O.L.A.F.S to be able to scan for these bacterias and identify them while in the wild. The use of robots means that we can create something that will be able to survive in the wild and be small enough to scan for bacteria even in the most dangerous environments.  This also means we can leave in the wild and not worry about it, if something were to happen it’ll send a signal control centre. The blue circles on both of the ends are the wheels that will be able to outstand any bumps in the forest or wherever the robot is based. The Cylinder-like thing in the middle is where a camera and information scanner will be. All of the information will be processed and then sent to the control centre. The robot will have the technology that can withstand the wildlife and not break down or stop working. This robot took a lot of thinking to come up with.

After we came up with our idea, we decided to design prototypes for our great robot. Connor is a whiz with technology so we decided to let him handle most of the technical design. Our design was inspired by Sphero Ollie, which is quite similar but our design looks better in my opinion. We think that this design will hold up in tough weather conditions. Our group used tinkercad.com to design Olaf. 

Our final part of this process was to create a presentation to showcase our ideas and the process we went through to get our final product. Our group made two presentations, one on google slides that we used for just our group to read out as we presented and the other presentation was created on Prezi.com that we used to show our class. (sphero ollie above) Overall our presentation went well, the class was respectful and we presented okay. Our group had to come up with a business name and ours was Elsa robotics because, in frozen the movie, Elsa created Olaf. So we thought that was quite a smart play on the movie! This is actually a real competition where you actually build the prototype. Who knows, our group might just do it? Here is the link to our presentation Click this link to check it out!

The experience of doing this challenge was quite enjoyable, it let us explore our own creativity and allowed us to do something that we might not have done before. Our group worked really well together and we all contributed. Our presentation was great and we weren't too nervous. 

This experience I gained knowledge on how to work as a team and create an effective product. I learned that when you disagree on something, it can be tough to figure out a way to fix it, but in the end. I also learned that sometimes it can be tough working with your mates. 

Please comment below on what you think about this challenge and if you would do it yourself. Until next time...