Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category

Technology Post #7

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

 

Technology Post #6

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

Technology Post #5

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.

Technology Post #4

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

 

Technology post #3

Hello everybody,

Today in class we learned about atoms and our universe. I find it so interesting that there could be something as small as an atom and something as big a our universe. I I learned that each star we see in the sky is a planet, and when you look at the stars, it is basically like looking at the past because light years (even though they travel super fast) can’t get to us right away all the way from the stars, so the stars that you look at in the sky might not be there anymore and the stars might look totally different. Another thing is that a man sent a machine into space over 40 years ago and it is the fastest moving thing in the world. It only just reached the edge of our solar system last year! Think about how big our solar system is, but then if you look at the size of our solar system compared to the Milky Way galaxy, it looks tiny. We also learned about atoms using a grapefruit as an example. There are tons of atoms in a grapefruit. If you make the grapefruit to be the size of the earth, an atom would be about the size of a blueberry, that’s a lot of blueberries! I find it so interesting and confusing to learn about atoms and to learn about our universe.

Bye!

– Avery

 

Technology Post #2

Hello everybody,

It is the second day on technology and it has been really fun so far, I think this will be the best quarter of the year. Many people have told me about a lot of things that we will be doing this quarter. The thing that I am most excited about is making flashlights. I have seen the ones that other classes have made and they look really cool. I think that you get to make the actuall flashlight inside, and design the outside. We have just started to learn about electricity and I think that that means we will be making our flashlights soon. We started by learning about the history of electricity, it goes all the way back to 585 B.C. I also learned about how amber is made from tree sap and how it plays a big part in how electricity was made, if you rub amber it attracts dust and feathers. Anther thing that we talked about the different ideas of scientists from back in time, and how a guy, Democritus belived that if you break something enough times, it will not be able to be broken up again. William Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth the first’s docter, was the first to ever to use the word electric. There are so many interesting facts that we learned and I am so excited to learn more.

Bye!

-Avery

 

Debate Unit

Hello everyone,

For the past month or so my class has been doing a debate unit. My group picked a topic to debate over. Our topic was Should We Drink Bottled Or Tap Water we did a little research and then we split our group in two, one side would be debating for bottled and one side would be debating for tap water. I wanted to debate for bottled but four out of the five people wanted bottled. Originally bottled was Kate, Dani and me and tap was Barbara and Hana. Then we had to switch it around. For bottled it was Dani, Hana and me, for tap it was Barbara and Kate. We researched a lot about our topic and we got three reasons and three pieces of evidence for each reason. We did an informal debate and we got feedback on how to make it better for the formal debate. But we had another problem, Barbara was going on vacation and she would leave a week before break. So we only had four people and someone on Bottled had to switch to tap. I volunteered to switch but Hana did instead. Since this was the most important debate we wanted to make our debate stronger. So we gathered pictures, diagrams and quotes. We also prepared great rebuttals. We did a practice debate right before our formal debate. Then we had a problem, we realized that our rebuttals were out of order so we had to switch them. That caused a big argument, we thought that if they went first it would be fixed. It wasn’t. We thought for a while and figured the only solution was we had to switch rebuttals last minute. I was really nervous for the debate. When my teacher called us to come in I started freaking out. When we were going and it was time to rebuttal I had to say what Dani would’ve said.  I was a little to nervous and I showed it. Overall I think this was a pretty good unit and I defiantly learned a lot.

Here is the video of the debate:

Coding – #4

Hello everybody,

Today I made another Tynker project. I made a rock band. When you tap an instrument, it will animate itself and play some music for you, although some don’t have any movement at all. I had a lot of fun making this, but at first I made the whole thing not realizing I was not signed in. This was a big problem because the first project took a lot of time, and when I went to my account, it was gone. I was so annoyed, but I figured that it would be easier since I already knew what I was going to do and how to do it. I used a tutorial for all of the music but I made the movement by myself. I really feel like I’ve learned a lot by making these coding projects, because before I relied on the tutorials to do everything, but now I can do stuff on my own. The only thing I use the tutorials for is to give me ideas and sometimes I use them for help. I am so proud of all of the work I’ve done for these projects and I really learned a lot.

This is my Rock Band game:

Coding – #3

Hello everyone,

I made another Scratch project, it’s a fashion game where you can change what the girl, Dani is wearing. Basically all you have to do is tap on whatever you want to take off (don’t take off the pants because she doesn’t have any others) and then tap on whatever you want to put on. It’s that simple! I used one of the tutorials to make this but at the end I personalized it a bit. I had so much fun making this and I hope you have a lot of fun playing it.

This is the Fashion Game:

Rube Goldberg – Post 7

Hi everyone,

We succeeded! Finally our Rube Goldberg worked. We  made everything higher so that when anything is rolling it’s still getting momentum. After we rebuilt it, it worked on the first try. I was so happy. We wanted to get two successes so we tried a couple more times. We failed about five times but we succeeded twice.

I had so much fun doing this unit. I think my favorite part was when we succeeded and my least favorite part was when the dominoes kept knocking over, that’s why we used Janga blocks in the end.

This is our final video:

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