Capstone – Making My Final Presentation

 

After many steps in the Capstone process, it was finally time to make my presentation. The options for my presentation were TED talk, ignite, Adobe Spark Video, WeVideo, and a screencastify. I chose an Adobe Spark Video. I chose this one because I didn’t want to have to deal with the pressure of doing my presentation on top of all the pressure I was already under.

 

The thing I enjoyed most about making my final presentation was that I could really work on my presentation for a while at a time but not get bored because making my presentation was very fun and interesting. This is how I know that I picked a good topic for me, I am interested in it. I also enjoyed seeing my presentation come together step by step until the final product.

 

One challenge that I faced was finding a good picture for what I was talking about. Sometimes I would be looking for a certain picture but I wouldn’t be able to find it, so I would just put a picture of someone sleeping, since that is my topic. The reason why I couldn’t find many pictures that I wanted to use is because I needed to make sure that I had permission from the person that took the picture to use it. To do this, I didn’t need to contact the person, I just needed to set the category on my google search to “Labeled For Reuse” which means that I am allowed to reuse the picture. But, the pictures that are labeled for reuse are usually not as good as the ones that aren’t.

 

Another challenge that I faced was making the slides shorter. I originally had to make each slide last for no more than six seconds which was kind of impossible to do since I wouldn’t even be able to say one of my long sentences in six seconds. So, my teacher allowed me to make some of my slides a little longer and now none of my slides go over ten seconds. But still, I need to talk pretty fast in order to keep my slides under ten seconds.

 

I have mixed feelings on whether or not I’m excited to share my final product because on one hand, what if people do not like it, but on the other hand, what if people really enjoy it. Overall though, I think that it will be fun to know that lots of people are going to watch something that I put a lot of effort into! Here is the link to my final Capstone presentation:

 

Capstone: Interview

After we figured out all of our questions and started researching, we had to find someone to interview. This process was very hard for me because I kept finding people to interview, but they never responded to me! The first person I contacted was a Professor of Neurology, Mark Nan Wu. He would have been a perfect person for me to interview, but he never responded to my email! Then I called two sleep doctors separately to see if they would respond. They didn’t! Then finally I found another sleep specialist and I emailed her and she replied in half an hour. This just shows that you have to keep trying and never give up!

The person’s name who agreed to let me interview her is Dr. Shelby Harris. She is a sleep specialist. I chose to interview her because my Capstone topic is sleep, and she is a sleep specialist so she knows a lot about sleep. She has a website. If you want to check it out, here’s a link to it:

https://www.drshelbyharris.com/

The process for setting up the interview was very long. I of course had to first find someone to interview, but then I had to do many other things. My interviewee and I had a lot of back and forth emails about what date/time my interview would be, and how we would do it. We couldn’t do it in person for obvious reasons, so at first, we thought he could do a phone conversation where I ask her the questions and she responds through the phone. But then we couldn’t find a date and time that worked for us both, so we ended up doing the interview like this: I sent her the questions through an email, and she responded through another email. Here are the questions that I asked her:

  1. Why did you want to become a sleep specialist?
  2. What did you have to do in order to become a sleep specialist?
  3. What are the most common types of sleep disorders?
  4. What are some signs that someone might have a sleep disorder?
  5. How many hours of sleep should a kid get? Teen? Adults?
  6. What do you like the most about your job?
  7. What do you like the least about your job?
  8. Which stage of sleep is the most important? Why?
  9. What are the rarest types of sleep disorders?
  10. Are sleep disorders able to be cured completely? If so, which ones?
  11. What happens if someone is very sleep-deprived?
  12. What age groups have more sleep disorders or are more sleep-deprived, kids, teens, or adults?
  13. What happens in each stage of sleep?

The most interesting thing that I learned as a result of the interview is that some sleep disorders can be cured, but not all. For example, some sleepwalking and sleeptalking issues can be solved by just making sure you get enough sleep and are practicing proper hygiene, and insomnia and sleep apnea can only sometimes be cured.

Throughout the interview process, there were many challenges such as it was very hard to find someone to interview and figuring out how we were actually going to do the interview. But, I think that coming up with questions was fairly easy. Overall, the interview process was very successful for me!

Capstone: Choosing My Topic and Main Inquiry Question

My class has recently started a project called Capstone. A Capstone is something where first you think of a topic that interests you, then you make a main inquiry question related to that topic. A main inquiry question is a question related to your topic that is the overall question that you will be trying to answer when you start your research. But, to answer that question you need to come up with sub-questions. Sub questions are questions that you have to answer that will answer your main inquiry question. Then you need to start researching each question. After that is done, you interview an expert on the topic. Once you have done all that, you finally take all the information you have gathered, and you put it in a presentation! In this post, I will be talking about finding my topic and inquiry question.

My topic for Capstone is sleep. I chose this topic because my mom is always saying that sleep is important. So, I wanted to know more about sleep, and every time my mom said how important sleep is, I got more interested, so I chose it for my Capstone topic! At first, I was thinking, Is this topic going to be interesting, I don’t want it to be boring! But then I realized that I thought it was interesting so I stuck to that topic. My main inquiry question is “What are the four stages of sleep and what happens if those stages are disturbed?” Something that was helpful when choosing my main inquiry question is that my teachers helped me, so I knew if it was good or not. If they weren’t helping me, I would always be skeptical throughout Capstone if my main inquiry question was good enough! A challenging part of choosing my main inquiry question is that there are so many different kinds of questions having to do with sleep, that at first, I didn’t know which kind of questions I wanted to use!

Overall, I have learned about myself as a learner that I learn pretty well when I research, and when there is a virtual lesson. I don’t think that learning from home is too much harder than learning in school. It is a little bit harder, but I think I am managing it just fine.

 

Martin Luther King Jr.

This coming Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. day, it celebrates him as a person and his many achievements in life. In school, we learned all about Martin Luther King Jr. and his achievements in life. I made a timeline with all the important dates and events in his lifetime. It includes events from the dates of January 15, 1929 to April 9, 1968. This is it:

Martin Luther King Jr. Timeline

Date Event
January 15, 1929 BORN

Martin Luther King Jr, was born in Atlanta, GA

September 20, 1944 COLLEGE

Martin Luther King Jr, enrolls at Morehouse College

February 25, 1948 ASSISTANT PASTOR

Martin Luther King Jr, becomes an assistant pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, his father’s church

June 8, 1948 COLLEGE GRADUATE

Martin Luther King Jr, graduates from Morehouse College with a bachelor’s degree in sociology

September 14, 1948 CROZER

Martin Luther King Jr, enters Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, PA

January, 1958 CORETTA SCOTT

Martin Luther King Jr, meets Coretta Scott in Boston

June 18, 1953 MARRIAGE

Martin Luther King Jr, gets married to Coretta Scott near Marion, Ala

December 5, 1955 PRESIDENT

Martin Luther King Jr is named president of the Montgomery Improvement Association

January 30, 1956 BOMBED

Martin Luther King Jr’s home was bombed, no one was harmed

February 18, 1957 TIME

Martin Luther King Jr, appears on the cover on the Time Magazine

May 17, 1957 SPEECH

Martin Luther King Jr, delivers his first national address, “Give Us the Ballot”

September 20, 1958 STABBED

Martin Luther King Jr, is stabbed at a book signing with a letter opener by a mentally ill woman but he lived

February 1, 1960 MOVES

Martin Luther King Jr, moves to Atlanta to focus on the civil rights struggle

October 19, 1960 ARRESTED

Martin Luther King Jr, is arrested at a sit-in demonstration at a department store

 

December 16, 1961 ARRESTED

Martin Luther King Jr, and many others were arrested in a desegregation campaign

April 16, 1963 LETTER

Martin Luther King Jr, after being arrested wrote his famous Letter From a Birmingham

August 28, 1963 SPEECH

Martin Luther King Jr, gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial

December 10, 1964 PRIZE

Martin Luther King Jr, wins the Nobel Peace Prize

August 12, 1965 SPEECH

Martin Luther King Jr, leads civil rights marchers from Selma to Montgomery

January 26, 1966 MOVES

Martin Luther King Jr, moves to a Chicago apartment to demand better housing and education

December 4, 1967 PLANS

Martin Luther King Jr, unveils plans for a Poor People’s Campaign

March 23, 1968 MARCH

Martin Luther King Jr, leads 6,00 people in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis. It ends in violence and looting

April 3, 1968 SPEECH

Martin Luther King delivers his final speech “I’ve been to the Mountaintop”

April 4, 1968 DEATH

Martin Luther King Jr, was shot and killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel

April 9, 1968 BURIAL

Martin Luther King Jr, was buried in Atlanta

 

Martin Luther King has achieved many things, and done many speeches. He delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech. It is a very motivational speech, it really made a big impact on those who wanted segregation. Think about it, if Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t stood up for civil rights, had he not spoken out, things just might be the same now as they were back then. In his speech, Martin Luther King Jr, said “all men are created equal,” thanks to him, there are.

Final Reflection

We are at the end of our rocketry unit. All that’s left is the slideshow which we have to do in front of parents. It has been a really fun experience and I have learned a lot. But even still, I am happy that it’s almost over because working with my group was really hard. I still liked doing rocketry a lot even though I didn’t like working as a team as much.

 

I learned so much about rocketry, rockets, and the process of it all. First, I learned about the engineering design process, and how you have to go through all the steps, get your final result, and start all over again! I also learned about rocketry and about thrust, lift, weight, and drag. I learned that in a group, you have to compromise. I learned about how in a slideshow you can’t put too many words on a page. I learned so many things, I can’t even list them all.

 

What I enjoyed the most is basically the whole unit and launching the rockets. Therefore, my favorite phase is the launch phase because you get to go outside and launch your rocket. The thing I enjoyed the least is the group working part because it is hard to agree on what everyone wants to do. Also, sometimes people mess around and you don’t get any work done. My least favorite phase was the design phase because all you do is make a drawing of what you want your rocket to look like. Overall, it was a really fun experience.

My group.

Designing and Building Rocket #3

After we designed, built and launched rockets #1 and #2, We had to take all the information that we had gathered about what worked well, and what didn’t work well. Designing the 3rd rocket was easier than designing the 2nd because since we already changed one thing of our rocket, it was easier to figure out what we were going to change on our 3rd one because there were less options. Now I’ll tell you all about the process of designing and building rocket #3.

 

For rocket #3, my team decided to change the fins into longer and wider fins. This is because we had already changed the body of our rocket to a thicker tube, and we think that it didn’t really make a difference between the thin or thick tube. But, our second choice would be to change the fins, so we are keeping the body and nose cone the same and changing the fins. Our team decided more easily about what to change, and we made the decision quickly. We agreed the whole time, so we didn’t fight.

 

I think that our design for our 3rd rocket is a good one. I always wanted to make the fins bigger so I’m happy that we are making them bigger. We are also putting them a little higher up on the rocket because the group’s rocket that went the highest on the first launch, did that. So we have bigger fins so the air deflects off them more, a thick body for more air flow, and a tall nose cone so that it cuts through the air. I think it is our best design yet. My team collaborated well during this stage and we didn’t argue with each other.

 

Then, it was time to build our rocket. It was a little easier to agree on things than it was when we built the first and second rocket, because one of the members of our team, wasn’t there. We glued the fins on (and this time we didn’t wrap it in tinfoil because when we did that before, it didn’t do anything). We also glued the nose cone on, and then we wrapped tape around it too just to be safe. Our rocket looks good. Its colors are green, yellow, and blue. I think it will do well because of the bigger fins. We’ll just have to wait and see.

 

Finally, it was time to launch our third and final rocket. I was really excited for this launch because I thought that my team’s rocket would go high because we had lots of experience from designing and building our other rockets so I thought that this was the best design and that it wold go the highest. We launched our rocket and it turns out that it went 114 feet high. I was really disappointed because it went WAY lower than I thought it was going to. But, if you really think about it, 114 feet high is pretty high, so it was okay.

Designing and Building Rocket #2

After we launched our 1st rocket, we needed to design and build our 2nd rocket. It was hard because you needed to change your rocket in one way. You had to take what you learned from the 1st launch and and what the other teams had that made them do well. It was also hard to agree on things. We mostly looked at the team’s rocket that went the highest because theirs was the only one that went higher than ours, so we wanted to know why.

 

For our 2nd rocket, we decided to change the body. This is because if we change the tube to a thicker tube, the air pressure is the same but the air inside the rocket has more room, so more air can go from the pump to the rocket body. This will make the rocket have more thrust, so it will go higher. There was a little bit of arguing about what to change because we didn’t know if the thicker tube would work so we didn’t know if we should use it. But in the end we worked it out.

 

Our 2nd rocket design was pretty similar to our 1st rocket design. It was hard to tell that we were changing the body, but when we labeled it, it was okay. We had the thicker tube so that the PSI is the same, but there’s more thrust. Our fins stayed the same because they aren’t too big, so they won’t weigh the rocket down, but they are big enough so that the air repels off the rocket. We also kept our nose cone the same because it really good and tall, and it really cuts through the air and it didn’t push against the air too much, which would slow the rocket down.

 

I think that building our 2nd rocket was fun because we all knew from our last rocket what worked, and what didn’t. For example, wrapping the nose cone in tinfoil didn’t work, so we didn’t do that again. We made our nose cone out of cardstock, so that it wasn’t flimsy and bendable. We made our body out of cardstock too so that when the air went into it, it wouldn’t push the paper out wider. Finally, we made our fins out of cardboard because if we had made them out of paper, that they would bend all around. We didn’t cover them in tinfoil this time. There was a little arguing about who glued what, but we figured that out, too.

 

Building our 2nd rocket.

Launching/Graphing Rocket #1

After we made our rocket, it was time to launch. Then we had to graph the results. In this blog post I will be telling you all about our 1st launch, and graphing our 1st launch. It was really fun watching our rocket shoot into the sky, but before that happened, there was a mishap that you will learn about right now…

When we launched our rocket, the nose cone blew off! It went pretty high, but the rocket body didn’t budge. This was because we wrapped the nose cone in tinfoil so when we glued it on we only glued the tinfoil on, not the paper inside. So, the paper ripped through the nose cone. We went back to the classroom with our Aide, Mrs. Clemente, and taped it back on with lots of tape. After we did this it went really high!

One other team had to patch theirs up too, but the rest of the teams’ rockets went well. I was the rocket placer and a pumper. I wanted to be the countdown master, and retriever, but my jobs were still okay. I also think that I was accurate with the clinometer. Our team collaborated well and we all worked together to fix our rocket.

After we taped our nose cone back on and launched it again, it went 46.5 meters. Then, when we converted it into feet, it was 153 feet. It was the second highest. The highest went 192 feet.

I think that our rocket did really well, but I also think that we can do better. For our second rocket, we are going to change the body to the thicker tube because there is the same amount of air pressure, but more air inside the rocket. This will hopefully make our 2nd rocket go higher. Our team collaboration during this was good, but we had a little trouble deciding whose graph we would use. Overall, I think that it was really fun.

 

Designing and Building Rocket 1

This year, my class has been doing rocketry. It is very fun and interesting because you get to learn about rockets including launching and building them. But, through all this fun, you also need to work together with your group and you need to agree on what your rocket is going to look like. First, you need to design your rocket, then you need to build it. Finally, when you feel satisfied with your rocket, you can launch it. But, it takes a lot of work to do that so even though it’s fun, it’s hard work, too.

Before we could design and build our rocket, we had to research about what would make a good rocket. We looked at websites, videos, diagrams, and more. We learned about the forces that impact rocket flight such as lift, thrust, weight, and drag. Lift is an upward force that makes the rocket shoot into the sky, for this we used a bike pump. Thrust is used to overcome the weight of the rocket, as it keeps it going through the sky. The air that is inside the rocket after the bike pump shoots it up, creates this. Weight is a force that makes the rocket fall to the ground because of gravity. Drag is a force that opposes the force of thrust. Therefore, thrust must be greater than drag. This helped us design our rocket because after researching, we then knew that we should try to make the rocket as light as possible so that the weight isn’t greater than drag.

My group in rocketry had trouble designing our 1st rocket because everyone wanted to do something different. But we chose a design that looked like it would be the most successful and started discussing things like how wide our rocket should be, and what our fins and nose cone should look like. When we actually started designing rocket 1, we realized that we wouldn’t be able to build it like we had talked about. So, we made some changes, and made it more realistic. We had a tall nose cone so that it could cut through the air, a thin body tube so that the air that would push the rocket up was more compressed, and 3 medium sized fins that would make the air deflect off our rocket.

When our design was finished, we started building our rocket. To make our body, we took the skinnier PVC pipe and wrapped thick paper around it pretty tightly, but loose enough so that the pipe could come out again. Then we taped the ends of the paper that we had just rolled up together, and our rocket body was finished. To make our fins, we made a fin template that would show what size our fins would be. We made them out of cardboard. Then we measured where our fins would be. We all wanted to glue them on, so we each glued one fin on, and then the person who didn’t get to glue one on, glued the nose cone on. Finally, we hot glued them on to make them stable. Then we had to make our nose cone. We made 2 nose cones out of thick paper and taped them together so that it was taller. Then, we wrapped it in tinfoil so that the air would slide off that rocket more. Lastly, we hot glued it on so that it wouldn’t pop off. And, finally, our 1st rocket was finished!

Our finished rocket.

 

Rocketry

I have been learning a lot about rocketry this year so far. It is really fun but it’s also a little hard to agree and work with your team. I learned things from what makes the rocket go high, to what makes the rocket too heavy to go really high. For example, before I started rocketry I had no idea what would make the rocket go highest. But now I know to put fins so that the air can slide off the rocket and not slow it down. I learned lots of other things too.

When my group started our inspiration board, we disagreed a lot. We kept deleting pictures that other people put on the google drawing. When we started to print out the pictures and quotes and other things, there wasn’t enough to fill the paper. It really inspired me while I was looking for more quotes because I kept reading them. So that encouraged me to keep trying and to keep looking. We finished our inspiration board and I’m really proud of how it turned out. Then we started making our first rocket design. We included a very pointy nose cone so that it can slice through the air. There is also a thin body so that it is lighter. The fins are at the bottom of the rocket and are slanted so that the air slides off the rocket.

I’m really looking forward to actually building our first rocket. Although I don’t know what we will build it out of yet. I’m also looking forward to our first rocket launch. I think it will go pretty high because our 1st rocket model design looks good and it looks like if we make that rocket, then it will go high. I’m also looking forward to our last rocket design and what that will look like after we have learned what makes the rocket go highest. Overall, I’m basically looking forward to the whole unit.

My class.