For human rights day my class and I used wooden musical instruments and talked about how they related to Ghana. Today my class and I read around 5 different articles about wooden musical instruments to follow up about what we did on human rights day. From the first article called wood in music I learned 3 main things. One being that the sound of wood hitting wood was one of the first musical sounds to emerge. The second being that the earliest woodwind instruments were tubes in a horn shape. This second fact was especially shocking because to me the simplest instrument seems to be a drum. The last thing I learned from this article was that wood can be used to make so many instruments. The second article is called Tone Wood: What You Need To Know, from this article I learned that different kinds of instruments give off their best sounds when the right wood is used. This is super cool to me. The 3rd article was about how tree species are being threatened because they produce really nice sounds and everyone wants to use them. The last article was about the process of making a wooden instrument. I learned there are a lot of steps to making a wooden instrument. Last but not least I watched a video. The video taught me that the process of making a drum is FULL of manual labor, it takes such hard work, and it requires close attention to detail. This is only some of what I learned from reading these articles and watching that video. I hope to learn more about how wood is used in instruments!
Hi everyone! This quarter I am starting tech 7 and I am so happy about it. I have built many things such as a flashlight and circuits. These things were an assignment in tech 6 so I guess you could say my teacher her gave me the idea. I worked alone on both of these projects. To build the flashlight I used pvc pipe, an led light, wires and markers to decorate the plain pvc pipe. Once the flashlight was built I took it to camp and used it. Unfortunately I left it at camp which means I cannot post a picture of it.
5 days ago I finished my flashlight. In order for it to work we needed to have a circuit inside. This circuit was made by cutting wires to a certain length depending on the size of your flashlight. Then we striped half an inch off of each end of the wire. Then we connected a battery, switch and an led light in between the 3 wires. We needed a `way to keep the circuit together so we used sauder to do it. Once we made our circuit we put it in the flash light made out of PVC pipe. We made sure it worked then we decorated. I wrote a K in pipe cleaners on mine. I also put 3 rows of pink and yellow beads surrounding the led light. I then finished the decorating off by coloring it in paint markers.
A little while ago we started to make flashlights. We first made a diagram of our flashlights, then we started to make them. I used PVC pipes to make mine. We needed to cut the pipes to a length of our choice. To cut the pipes we used saws. We cut our pipes pretty small because it needed to fit in a box. I liked working with the PVC pipe and the saw. One of the hardest things to do when working with the PVC pipe is sawing it because as you got near the end of cutting it, it was harder to cut.
Yesterday, we played the switch game. I really liked playing the game. The way the game was played was by two people putting down cards and depending on the colors of the cards you would hit a switch. If the driver, or the person using the switch misses or in other words hits the wrong switch then the 4th person makes a mark on a sheet of paper next to your name. At the end whoever has the most marks or misses loses. I wasn’t very good at the game, but it was still super fun and I hope we do it again before this quarter is over.
A little while ago we started to sauder our sauder our people. Before we did this we needed to make our sauder people. We cut and bent wire in the shape of a person and made arms. It was hard to bend the wire, but I eventually figured it out. Then we saudered our people. Sauder is melted metal that works like a glue. It is super hot. To apply the glue you need to use an iron and then melt the glue. The iron is super hot! Around 800 degrees. Saudering was very fun, but was a bit hard. This part of the switch and sauder project was really fun and I really liked it!
A little while we started making our circuits for a project. These were not simple circuits. We needed to make three. We were given a list of different types of switches we could make. I decided to make a classic switch where you take the lever and just move it forward and backward to make it work. For my 2nd switch I made a popsicle stick switch. The way it works is that you press a popsicle stick to the base of the circuit. For my final switch I made a push switch. The way this switch works is that is there is a stick that you push forward to activate the switch. I made my switches out of cardboard, hot glue, straws, and tin foil. I really liked making these switches and hope to make more soon!
In technology the other day, we made circuits. We made circuits because we had learned about electrons, positives, and negatives. The circuits were not super difficult to create because we had all of the resources and had a lot of background knowledge. To make the circuits we used wire, batteries, a switch and a light bulb, the goal of the circuit was to light up the light bulb. Mine worked very well. This was a super fun project and a great learning experience. I hope to keep doing fun projects like this because I learned a lot from this one.
The other day we started learning about Atoms, negatives and positives. While learning about these things I learned that negatives do not attract to other negatives and more about electron’s. I also learned that atom’s are in everything and that they are super, super, super small. I think I have a good understanding of what atoms, positives, negatives and electrons are and what they do in our world. I hope to keep learning about these things in tech!
Today in tech we did a breakout. To solve this breakout you had to find clues around the room and decode them then put them into their locks. We were divided into two teams of about 12 and had to work together to solve the lock. All the answers to the lock had to do with the safety rules. This was super fun and I learned a lot more about safety today and learned more about good communication during this activity. This is really fun and I hope to do more of this kind of stuff in tech.