Hello everybody,

For the past few weeks I have been working on my automata in technology. An automata is a simple machine that uses cams and followers to make something go up and down, spin, etc. For my automata, I am making a penguin which goes on top, spin and go up and down. I will also make the wings flap.

First to make this, you have to start by making a box without sides, to a certain length, width, and height. Then we have to stabilize the box with little triangular pieces of cardboard so the box was not floppy. After we did that we had to put our cam and followers in. To do that we needed to poke holes in the right place to put the axle in, and we had to make cams and put them on the box. After that we had to add the follower. First to do that, you have to poke a hole in the top and put in the axle, then make a follower. After you finish that you have to glue some things together and then you are done with the base. For my top I am making a penguin go up and down, and the wings are going to flap down, and up. Today, I just finished cutting out the penguin and attaching it to my box, and tomorrow I am going to make the bottom blue and then I am done.

I had a lot of fun building my automata and I am excited to finish it tomorrow.

Bye!

– Avery

Hello everyone,

At the beginning of making the flashlights my teacher told us a story about these boys that were stuck in a cave for nine days and it was dark in the cave. So that led us to trying to make water proof flashlights. I did not know if my flashlight was water proof, I just had to try and put everything in tightly and hope that it would work. Last night I went home and tested in under my sink. It was water proof! It is so cool. Making the flashlight was so much fun. I never really thought about what goes into making such a simple thing like a flashlight because all it does is turn on a light, and turn it off. It turns out that a lot of work actually goes into making a single flashlight. There has to be a battery and a switch and certain positive and negative wires. The positive and negative wires or sides on the battery were probably the most confusing and hardest to remember part. The reason is that they all had to go on certain sides and then I might forget what side they went on and I had to go back and ask someone, which could take a while. Overall I had a lot of fun making my flashlight.

Bye!

– Avery

Hello everybody,

I just finished my flashlight! It has been such a long process, but it was all fun. At the beggining, we had to learn how to draw out the shapes of the pieces on a piece of big graph paper. After we finished that we moved onto making our diagrams for the flashlight. It had to be excactly to scale and every curve had to be right. Then we had to draw the wires and measure them to make them the right size. We were able to do that by using a story line. Next we could finally begin with the actual flashlight. I finished my diagram in abut two days, but it took some people about a week. To start the actual flashlight, first I cut the wires and skinned the edges of them off to make it easier to solder them. Then, since none of the soldering irons were open, I cut my pipe. I used a saw and cut it three and a half inches. The next day the solders we ready, but I lost all of my wires! So I had to cut them and skin them all over again. Once I did that I was able to solder. After I soldered I got all of the pipes and wires together, and I cut holes in the pipes where the switch and the lights would go. Then I put the wires in and sealed it up and I was finished making it! Finally, I drew on it to make it look pretty. Overall, I had a lot of fun making my flashlight and I learned a lot.

Bye!

– Avery

P.S. This is a picture of my finished flshlight:

Hello everyone,

I finished all three of my switches yesterday before class was over. So today and yesterday I have been working on challenges. My teacher gave us a bin of wooden blocks all about the same size, and he gave us three pieces of paper with different things to create that were very complicated and they needed to be balanced out very well in order for it to work. I did the first two that he gave me pretty fast, because I had a pretty good strategy. When  I started to do my third one, I could not do it for so long, we could not figure it out for so long (I did it with someone else for the third one). This is because the other two had a certain kind of structure that was the same, but the third on was totally different. In the first two, all of the blocks were close together and they helped each other balance, but in the third one, they were very spread out. It was really fun to do because I did not know how they were going to turn out until the end. Also, for the third one, we got it right at the end of class right before the bell rang, which was pretty cool because we left class having done it when we had been trying almost the entire class time to do it.

Hello everyone,

Today I finally got to use the soldering iron. At first when I got there I was really scared to do it. I got everything ready, I put the solder man in the third arms (the things that hold what you are soldering), I put my safety glasses on, and I tied my hair back. Since I was scared I watched someone else do it so I knew how. Then I started, it was actually kind of fun. My favorite part was how the solder just melted right as it touched the soldering iron. First, I added arms to my solder man, I added them going out straight. When I finished soldering, I wet my solder man with a wet sponge to cool it down. Once it was cool I took it out and curved the arms a bit. Then I made a bag for the solder man to hold, I had to solder the bottom and top parts of the bag together. After I did that, I soldered the bag onto the man. Next I tried to make a stand for the person to stand on so it wouldn’t fall down. But that did not work because I added too much solder, so all of it was dripping off of the bottom of the stand, so if I tried to stand it up it would tilt. Also, the stand broke off right after I took it off the third arms. Instead of using the stand I just curved the feet to make them able to stand.

Bye

– Avery

Hello everyone,

Today in class we began working on a new project. We are making solder men out of metal wires. Today we learned how to fold and twist the head and body of the man, but tomorrow I think that we will be using another piece to make the arms and soldering them together. It was really heard to do it because we first had to cut the wire and then we had to twist it in different ways using wires. It was hard because we were working with something so small.

It’s the next day and today in technology we continued to work on our solder men. My teacher taught us how to solder the arms on to the legs, and how to do any other soldering. We only have four solders in the class so I didn’t get to go today. I probably will tomorrow though because today he had to teach us how to do it and that took time. Since I did not solder today, I worked on my switch. I finished my first one, it did not turn out fully as I expected though. It’s the same idea and it works the same way, but I had to add on a lot of things to stabilize it. I also came up with what I want to do with the arms for my solder man. I am going to make a bag and it will be holding that bag. I excited, but kind of scared to solder for the first time in my life, because it can get up to 800 or so degrees.

Bye

– Avery

Hello everyone,

On Friday my teacher was not there so we watched a movie about Nicola Tesla, it was very informative, but it kept skipping every 25 seconds, so it was not that easy to listen to the video.

Today in class we started to build our switches. They are for our circuits that we are going to make to turn on a light. We have to make three switches each because at the end we are going to play a game with them and cards. To make the switches we get one piece of cardboard (but if we run out there is a scrap bin that we can take from), some tinfoil, and any other items that we need like rubber bands, or tape. We also get to use some of the tools, today we got to use a tool that cuts circles in cardboard, but I forget what it is called. I made my switch by connecting pieces of cardboard like three sides of a box, but the one at the bottom is bigger than the others. Then after I did that, I glued a small ball of tinfoil to two rubber bands. Tomorrow I will connect them and then I will be finished with my switch. It is really fun doing this because up until now we haven’t really used any of the tools, but now we are.

Bye!

– Avery

Hi everybody,

Today in class we continued our conversation about self-driving cars from yesterday. We only had a 29 minute class today because it was the state test, and that takes up two hours of school. The whole class time we mostly just asked my teacher questions about self-driving cars, some of them he could answer, but some he could not. I think that it will be much safer with all self-driving cars on the road, but before our conversation I 100% thought that they were unsafe. The reason why I think that they will be much safer is because all of the cars will not ever go above the speed limit, but also (I find this part very interesting) all of the cars can communicate with each other in some way. For example if one car is going to stop, before it even slows down, it can and will signal to the other cars behind it that it will stop. I think that that will almost fully prevent crashes from happening, and it will be much safer. My teacher said that it will probably be allowed for all people around 2025-2030 and that is much sooner than it sounds. Right now there are self-driving cars, but it is against the law for people to use them, Tesla’s can be used because people are still steering them most of the time. I am really excited for when most cars on the road are self-driving, but I am happy that they are not being used yet because I feel like muy generation is going to be one of the last generations to learn how to drive, and get a drivers license.

Bye!

– Avery

Hello everyone,

Today we continued to use the website to make a circut, but we tried to make two different paths of lightbulbs, with two switches, but one battery. I was not successful. We also made real circuts ourselves. We used what we learned using the website to make it. I was able to do it after a lot of tries, but most people were not able to do it until they got help, and some were not even able to do it at the end. I think that’s its pretty cool that I now know what goes on inside of a lightbulb.

This is a picture of the circuits that we made, it’s not mine because I already disassembled mine by the time my teacher told us we should take pictures of them and put it on our blogs.

Its the next day and today in class my teacher told us a story of how his neighbor is blind, he told us to come up with helpful things for blind people. We came up with different technologies that could help them with transportation because they can’t see where they’re going. We came up with ideas that have been made but are just not used everywhere, like self-driving cars. We also came up with moon shot ideas, which are ideas that are almost imposible and could definitely not be done any time soon, like teleportation devices. The last thing we came up with are ideas of things that we would like to see in our communities that’s can be made, I said that we should make signs also speak, so that the blind can hear them. It was very interesting to think about new technologies to make it easier for the blind to travel, and I would like to see some of these ideas in real life.

Hello everyone,

This is my second week of technology and it has been really interesting so far. Today in class we started learning about static electricity and we also continued to learn about atoms. It was kind of confusing and I hope we do more on those topics because I didn’t fully understand it. We talked about the positive, negative, and neutral charges in an atom, and if you rub your feet on a carpet and touch someone’s ear, it will shock them. This is because the negative charges/electrons are gathering up on your feet and they are all let out of your body, and into the other persons body when you shock them.

On Thursday, I was not at school and I heard from people that we started to learn about how the electrons in a battery work and they also used a machine to find out how much voltage was left in a battery. Today we continued to learn about batteries and how they are able to turn lights on. We used a website to make a circut and I learned that the batteries let out electrons which travel through a wire to reach the light bulb. It was very fun and interesting to learn about how circuts work and make a circut on a website.

Bye!

– Avery