Immigration Blog Post 1

We have an immigration unit at school and we learned about push/pull factors. To understand immigration better, we have to interview an immigrant. The immigrant I’m interviewing is my grandma, Her name is Marie Grace DeWitt. We wrote down 20 questions and picked 10-15 of them to ask the immigrant.

My process of preparing for the interview started when I had to find an immigrant I knew but that was probably the easiest part because I already knew an immigrant in my family which was my grandma. Then I had to brainstorm some questions I could ask her about her life/journey being an immigrant. Some resources that helped me find all of my questions were brain pop and other kids’ videos. Most of the questions I thought of because I ask my grandma these questions in general.

My experience conducting the interview was good, it took a short time and it was conducted over the phone. It went as expected and Mary told me things that I didn’t know. I learned that it might be hard for the other person because it is bringing back memories and it might be sad. The most interesting thing I learned about Mary is that I she had a stepmother and a stepbrother because her mother died when she was little.

Overall the interview went well and I learned a lot more about my grandma that I didn’t know before! And I’m really excited to make the video because I have a lot of photos from when she lived in Italy.

Rube Goldberg Blog Post 2

My experience designing a Rube Goldberg machine was fun, hard, interesting, and challenging. The start of my process was drawing my sketch. For me this was the easiest part of it all because I am good at drawing so, I thought this was fun. But then I started building and things got a little bit harder. I changed a lot of this during my processes like different ramps, tubes, and many simple machines. After my 14th clip worked I was so relieved.

During my process of my Rube Goldberg project, I did not just learn how to now make the machine I also learned a lot from working on the project for a long time. Some things I learned were that even if you want to give up keep trying and you will succeed. Another thing I learned was that it’s sometimes fun to fail and you learn a lot from it. One main thing I learned is how machines work and how to can use them.

In my opinion, the video was the hardest part. I am the not best at editing so it took me a long time. I also got some help from one of my friends. I started with just putting all my clips together to get ready for when I start arranging them. When I started each clip looked the same and that was a hard part I experienced. But then when I came close to finishing I kept losing this one clip but in the end, I made it work. Also after watching my video over and over again I realized I could add some tweets that would make it better.

One main part that helped me a lot with my project was the resources I used. Some online resources I used were Youtube, Generation genus, and google. The Rube Goldberg machines video that I watched on the channel was “Joseph’s Machines” That was a main one I used.  Another thing that helped was books. It all started one day I was reading one of my favorite graphic novels (Camp) and there was this part where they were building this “machine” I thought to myself “WHAT IF IT’S A RUBE GOLDBERG!” and on the next page the words read “She did this! she ruined our RubeGoldburg machine” And it showed so many ideas I was so happy!

Overall this project was really fun and I’m looking forward to different science projects coming up because I learned a lot from this one. My hope is that future projects are as hands-on as the Rube Goldberg project. Whereas the Rube Goldberg project presented me with many design/build challenges I know that there will be aspects of future projects that will even be far more challenging. Having successfully worked through the challenges of this most recent project am fully confident that I have established a strong foundation for tackling future science projects.

This is My Sketch. hope you like it! :

This is my video. Hope you enjoy it! :