Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category

Technology Post #6

Hello everyone,

Since we cannot be at school currently I need to find some tools and materials inside of my house that I can use to create things at home.

I was able to find these tools:

– pencil
– eraser
– ruler
– scissors
– iPad
– screwdriver
– screw
– hammer
– nails

I was able to find these materials:

– cardboard
– paper
– toothpicks
– legos
– glue
– tape
– rubber bands
– paper clips

Those are the materials that I was able to find in my house. I am very excited to see what we will be doing with them soon.

Bye!

– Avery

Technology Post #5

Hello everyone,

This week I finished reading my book for English class. I also face timed my friends since we couldn’t hang out because of coronavirus. I am a little upset because all of my activities and sports were cancelled so I had absolutely nothing to do. My whole family except for my dad is home so we all had nothing to do. It gets a little boring staying at home all day with nothing to do even though it is instead of school. I am excited to go back to school and I hope I will be able to soon!

bye!

– Avery

 

Technology Post #4

Hello everybody,

This week I cut our front, back, and two sides of my box. That means that I am done cutting all of the pieces. I also had to sand them because they had tons of splinters on them. I was not able to sand the top and bottom of my box but I did the rest. My box is looking pretty good but the pieces aren’t all exactly the same size so I might need to sand it a little more so the pieces all fir together nicely. In order to sand the box we used a belt sander. It is a automatic sander where you need to touch your pieces to the rough sand paper as it is moving, and it will sand the piece of wood and make it perfectly smooth. it was much easier to do than I thought and it took a very short amount of time.

This is a picture of all of the sanded pieces assembled in a box shape:

Technology Post #3

Hello everyone,

This week we started to mesure and cut the pieces of our boxes. First we got a big piece of wood and we had to measure out the size if our top and bottom to cut it out. First we learned how to use a hand saw but I never got to use it because I wasn’t ready for it. The next day we learned how to use a miter box saw. It is a saw placed directly in the middle of a bed of wood, which the wood goes on top of.

This is a miter box saw looks like:

 

After we cut the top and bottom of the wood, we had to figure out the dimensions of the sides. Since the top and bottom are also 1/2 an inch tall, you need to subtract 1 inch altogether. So I measured out all of the sides. My sides were all 2 inches tall instead of 3 inches because I subtracted the 1/2 inches for the top and bottom. Next I think that we will start cutting our sides. Thanks for reading my blog!

Bye!

– Avery

Technology Post #13

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

Technology Post #12

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

Technology Post #11

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:

 

 

Technology Post #10

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.

 

Technology Post #9

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

 

Technology Post #8

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

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