Monthly Archives: March 2016

20% Time

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20% Time: At Google, engineers can spend a day or a week working on projects that aren’t necessarily in their job descriptions.
5 Boyer 20% Time: Twice a week we get a 40 minute period of time to work on new projects for our arcade.
Our class watched a video about a boy named Caine, who single handedly made an arcade using cardboard and packing tape from his dad’s auto part store. Our arcade was made using cardboard and a lot of tape mostly Duct and Scotch tape. When we watched the video our class became inspired to do the same thing as Caine.
Here is a link to the Caine’s Arcade website http://cainesarcade.com/
Below is the short film of Caine’s Arcade and how it evolved.

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Trisha’s Journey

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Patricia Polacco is an author that writes her book using slightly altered stories from her childhood. Our teacher Ms. Boyer read us books by her and after the books we wrote about her journey through the book Thank You Mr. Falker, in the end I came up with this.

In the beginning of the book Thank you Mr. Falker Trisha was excited when her grandpa drips honey on the cover of a small book that she is holding. When this happens she is carrying on a family tradition that he uncles, mom, and now her. The tradition is that when ever you turn five you get honey spooned onto the cover of a book because honey is sweet just like knowledge but knowledge is like the bee that made the honey, you have to chase it trough the book. Knowledge is very important to this family so the tradition means a lot to them. When Trisha started school she could not read very well. I know this because in the text it says that “while everyone was moving onto their second and third reader Trisha was still on her first, she started to feel dumb.” So Trisha became sad because she though when she couldn’t read she was stupid. Later in the book her grandma is walking with her in the woods and comforts her and makes Trisha feel good about herself. But soon after that there is a major bump in the road, her grandma dies and that made Trisha very upset because she loved her grandma very much. And to add to the badness of the situation Trisha’s mom gets a teaching job in California so Trisha will have to move with her from Michigan to California. But Trisha doesn’t think it will be too bad because maybe the kids there won’t know that she is dumb and she will get bye fine. But that all changes when the kids realize and think she is dumb. When Trisha starts fifth grade a new teacher comes, she feels better because it didn’t matter who the cutest or smartest kids were to the new teacher named Mr. Falker. Trisha starts to like him and he liked her and Mr. Falker is really nice to Trisha. But the nicer he is to her the meaner Eric was to her. Trisha became sad because he was so mean to her and one day Mr. Falker caught him being mean and sent him to the principals’s office never to be seen again. Even though Eric left Trisha still felt dumb but Mr. Falker wanted to help teacher her to read so he and a reading teacher named Miss Plessy helped Trisha out every day after school this did not only make Trisha happy she felt confident and at the end of this book she stays happy.

The Wizard of Oz Epilogue

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Here is my epilogue to the classic story, The Wizard of Oz if you don’t know what an epilogue is, it is an ending that you chose.

After Dorothy came back from Oz she lived happily with her dog Toto, aunt Em and her uncle Henry. She lived for many years filled with adventures such as the time she traveled to Treasure Island or the time where she met Frankenstein and she even met King Arthur and the Nights of the round table. Dorothy even traveled with Peter Pan to Never Land and fought Captain Hook. But Dorothy’s greatest adventure was when she came back to Oz and met all of her friends. The Scare Crow was a different story, he had become rich with power and became an evil ruler who all the Emerald City residents hated. They once tried to set him on fire during a bonfire ceremony. Sadly their attempt was successful.

    And the Tin Man who went to live in the land of the Twinkies lived happily and got along very well with them. Every night they would eat Hostesses and watch Sports Center on their 1000 inch Flat Screen TV. The Lion who was now the king of the forest lived for 3 years after Dorothy left. A T-Rex came and ate him because it wanted to be the king of the forest. But then a man came and kicked the T-Rex in the shin so he fell over and died. And the Wizard of Oz’s hot air balloon caught a jet stream and landed on a desert island surrounded by sharks, who were actually land sharks. So in the middle of the night Oz woke up being dragged into the sea by land sharks he quickly grabbed the nearest stick and clubbed the shark. After that he lived in a tree on the island because the sharks could not climb trees. Three days later he pulled a fully stocked yacht with a full crew out of his pocket and and he left the island in style. Oz’s boat was sunken by a mysterious RPG shot which blew up everyone on the boat except Oz, then while trying to swim to land he was eaten by a land shark.

Curling

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    On Tuesday my P.E. class is taking a field trip to the Ardsley curling center. Once there we will use our knowledge of curling to attempt a few matches. Because our current unit of learning is curling and because our P.E. teacher is a part time curler we get to go. Our school is the only school attending this field trip. We have practiced curling and sweeping stones during gym using ones with little wheels on them. I do not think that on the trip, curling will be easy because sliding a stone 140 feet to a 12 foot wide target does not sound too easy.

    The sport of curling was started in medieval Scotland where they used big rocks and house brooms. But technology has changed the sport to where now there are brooms that have a special tip so they warm up the ice faster. The shape of the stone has even changed to a circle and has gotten lighter with time.

    Also in P.E. we learned how to keep score and watched curling clips. This is a link to one curling top 10 shots video by TSN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYcYaUBaEeI John Morris is a curling gold medalist from the 2010 Winter Olympics. A few basic phrases in curling are “hammer”, which means you get to go last. Another is “The house” which is the thing you aim the stones at, and another is “The button”, that is the middle of the house. One last phrase is, “end”, that means the same thing as round. I am very excited to go on the trip even though I have almost no experience with curling my P.E. teacher says it will be fun.
Above is an image of two sweepers in action. The point of a sweeper is to warm up the ice to the point where it melts a little, eliminating most friction allowing the stone to move farther. 
Above is an image of an Olympic curling stone for a yellow team.
These are two different types of brooms, the one on the left was one of the first ever used. The one on the right is a modern day broom. The modern broom probably weighs half as much as the older one. And is much more efficient.

Heathcote Arcade

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 A few months ago our class was inspired after watching a video called Caine’s Arcade. In the video a boy named Caine built an arcade out of cardboard boxes and packing tape. Caine had built such sophisticated games such as a grabber machine, soccer match and he even made a booth where he gives out prizes and passes he also added in a little speaker so he could talk to the customers. When a boy in our class named Jared W saw the video he immediately wanted to create his own variant of Caine’s Arcade. One day in art Jared created this basketball/field goal game out of a little cardboard box thinking it was very cool I came over and asked if I could help. Soon after more boys wanted to join. Then the 5B Heathcote arcade was kind of born, we still needed more people to create and work more games. 
Below are pictures of games that 5B has made, on the left is Skeeball and the right is Whack a Mole made by the girls.
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Build Phase
    Our first real big game was Skeeball. Jared C and I started out with a cardboard box. We decided that a good Skeeball machine shape could be made with the sides of the box unfolded, it kind of already looked like the game. Our arcade started to expand from then on, lots of people started joining. In the beginning the arcade only included boys we realized the girls were also making an arcade so we decided to join forces. Our class made even more games now that we had much more people. Unlike Caine’s Arcade we have access to to circuit builders so that means we could make automatic electronic games. One that we made was from and arcade where you drop a ball in to a moving disc with holes and you try to get it into the holes. Jared W and I made the disc spin with a motor and the person playing will drop in the ball. People in our class also made prizes that cost tickets you win by playing games. A few prizes are superhero sets with the full gear and possibly a cape another is a lightsaber that looks like Kylo Ren’s from the new Star Wars movie.
Hopefully our arcade will be all finished by late March or early April.

Text Mapping with Padlet

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Today in school my class used padlet to map out the book What do you do with an Idea. We went over map skills so that we could map out the text sort of like how a person uses a map to find places but through text. My group used the times in the book that were first, second, next, later, finally and the moral of the story. At first my group had first, second and next. But we found that there was to much information to fit into 3 categories. So later and the moral came into play. Continue reading →

Feature Article

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Recently I started writing an article about something that interested me. I chose McDonald’s because I was very interested in their burger packed history, nutrition, their influence from Ray Kroc and the corporation’s rivals. I wrote a seven page article on google drive and fancied the final draft up on google drawing. I used mentor texts from TFKs and other feature articles that were written about Birds, Snakes and Volcanoes to help influence my formatting choices.  With help from my teachers and friends it is finished.

Rocket Launch #2

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Today we launched our rocket for the second time. We realized that our first launch went higher which is very uncommon. Our first launch launched about 3 meters higher and for most groups water and air made their rocket go higher because it added more thrust. That did not work for our group, possibly because we wanted to go with our original design but did not have all the materials so we substituted a sprite bottle with a Poland spring one. We also used a different kind of construction paper to form the nosecone. But overall we kept most of the same design and that was a choice I regret making. My group thought that because our rocket launched the second highest on the first launch we would do good on the second one. We did not think that other groups would take the first launch as a learning experience and create better rockets. 

    A few of Isaac Newton’s laws applied to our launches one of them was the second law and that is more force is needed to move an object with greater mass. That applies because if our rocket was too big and heavy it would not launch as high as a light and small rocket with the same amount of force applied. The next law that applies is the third law it states that with every action there is an equal ad opposite reaction. This applies to our rocketry because when we launched our rocket if 90 psi was not pumped in then there would not be enough force to push out the water in the bottom. Thus would be an action and the rocket not going as high would be a reaction.