Survival at Sea Game

Intro: To test what we thought was most important for surviving at sea ranking a list of 15 items from most important to least important.


Personal prioritization:
Top 2 items: (1) 25 liter container of water. Without water, we would die.
(2) A case of army rations. Even though we can survive longer without food than without water, we will still die without the basic necessity of food and energy.

Bottom 2 items: (1) Maps of the Pacific Ocean. There's no need for these maps since we're stranded in the Atlantic Ocean. Plus, maps are hard to read.
(2) A quantity of mosquito netting. There are no mosquitos in the middle of the ocean. And it would be hard to catch fish in it as well, so it's practically pointless.

I though the sextant was hard to list cause you might be able to use it if you knew how to, but I wasn't sure. Does shark repellent really exist?

Team Prioritization
We all ranked the 25 liter can of water the same, since water is important for survival. I ranked the shaving mirror closer to the bottom because I didn't see the need for it other than shaving, which I don't need to shave my face and there's no razer included with my items. I now see how crucial it is for signaling for survival. We all worked by comaring the most necessary items together and the least necessary items. From there, we thought out each item and how important and functional it would be for us.

Expert Prioritzation
I thought the water and food would have come first on the Coastguard's ranking, but the water ranks 3 and the food ranks 4. The hardest part of this challenge was figuring out all the uses an item could be used for. You would think that the only thing you could use the rum for was to drink, but with creative thinking, you could use that rum to disinfect any wounds you would get while stranded. I put more weight into both expert opinion and experiential data. The experts assume that everyone knows how to eat food, drink water, use a shaving mirror, but you may be able to know how to use a sextant with prior knowlege, so that wouldn't be a useless item. If you can send morse code with a small transistor radio, then that wouldn't be as useless as the Coastguards claim.