Category: 6th Grade

Tech #3 – Soldering

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For the past few days, we’ve been working on something called soldering. Soldering is a process when two or more items are attached by melting the items together. In this case, we’re using metal wires. In class, we are working on making pendants.

The first step was to brainstorm a couple of ideas for our pendant design. It was a little hard because we were only allowed to use five metal wires for our design. Then, we had to pick one design to use for our pendants. After a lot of thinking, I finally settled on one design. After we decided on which design we were going to do on the pendant, we had to make the outside of the pendant, but not the actual design yet.

We made the outside of the pendant by starting in the middle of the wire and wrapping the wire around the wooden stick, which would turn the wire into a circle. The reason why we started wrapping the wire in the middle is because we needed the two sides of the wire to tighten the circle. We had to twist the two wires three times, and when the outside of the pendant was tight enough, the outside of the pendant was complete. This was really fun and I’m so excited to make the actual design.

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Tech #2 – Atoms

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For the past few days in tech, we’ve been learning about atoms. Atoms are submicroscopic particles that make up everything. Atoms are made up of neutrons, protons, and electrons. We did an experiment that shows how electrons are attracted to protons. The materials I used were PVC pipes, wool cloth, and a glass jar. Inside the glass jar were two pieces of aluminum foil attached to a metal hook, and on top of the jar was a metal antenna.

In this experiment, I rubbed the wool cloth and the PVC pipe together. When I was doing that, I heard something that sounded like electricity, and that sound was actually static electricity. Once I finished doing rubbing them together, I moved the PVC pipe until it was touching the metal antenna. Inside the jar, the two pieces of aluminum foil moved away from each other.

Electrons are negatives, and negatives repel other negatives, which is why the two pieces of foil moved away from each other. While I was rubbing the wool cloth and the PVC pipe, the wool’s electrons got transferred to the pipe, and when the pipe touched the antenna, the electrons traveled down to the foil. Since all the electrons traveled down to the foil, they moved apart because a negative and a negative don’t attract. This experiment was really fun and I learned so much from it.

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Tech #1 – Breakout

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Ever since the first day of 6th grade tech, we reviewed twelve safety rules that is needed in tech. We did an activity called “Breakout” that has to do with the twelve safety rules. First, the entire class got split up into two groups. The goal of this game is to unlock a box filled with safety glasses. The box is unlocked when all of the locks have been unlocked. Luckily, each team had two hints for how to unlock the box. The challenging part of this game is that we were timed, and if the timer went off before we opened the box, then we would lose the game. We did’t know what the codes of each lock were, so we had to find clues hidden around the tech room that would lead us to the codes of all of the locks. There was also a bonus box, and the object inside the box is another clue.

My team started off really well. We found all of the clues in less than 15 minutes, but we were starting to run out of ideas for how to actually open the box. We asked our technology teacher for a clue. After that, we opened a lock. After we unlocked the first lock, we payed attention to all of the details on the clues. Since we payed attention to the details more, we unlocked a lock, and then another. Soon, we unlocked all of the boxes and won the game. This game was really fun and it was a great experience to have.

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