Choosing a Topic – Capstone #1

Hello everyone,

In fith grade at my school we do something called Capstone. Capstone is something where you pick a topic, come up with questions, do an interview and other stuff like that, then once you have your information we put together some kind of digital presentation and present it to a lot of different people.  My class started choosing our topic’s. We answered some questions, came up with more than one topic and narrowed down the topics to two. I have narrowed my topic’s down to Snapchat and Dō. For those who don’t know Snapchat is an app that allows you to take pictures of things and you can add filters then send them to your friends. Dō is a shop in NYC. It serves edible cookie dough, it also has ice cream. I think I am going to do Dō because I think it is interesting and it will be a good learning experience. I am excited to be doing this project and can’t wait to get started!

Edit: Hi guys, so after more consideration I decided to do Snapchat. I decided to do Snapchat because I will learn more from it and if I were to do Dō there wouldn’t be a good amount of information about it. I think I know what my inquiry question is, but I am not 100% sure.

Coding – #4

Hello everyone,

Today I will be talking about coding again. This was my last coding project. I used Scratch this time because I had to. I made my first game on scratch. I decided to do a classic game. Apples falls from the sky and you need to catch them in the bowl. The apples come from all different directions. The way to move the bowl from side to side is by using the arrow keys. To go right click the right arrow, to go left click the left arrow. I think it is fun and turned out well. This was an awesome experience because I felt like I could ad my own special touches to it. I loved this whole unit because it was fun and I learned a lot from it. Why don’t you try my game out for yourself:

“How to Make French Toast” – Ignite

Hello everyone,

Last week my classmates and I were assigned to do something called an Ignite. An Ignite is a series of slides that are each 15 seconds. In a traditional Ignite would be five minutes, but we decided to only make ours be one minute and forty five seconds because it was our first time. The goal of an Ignite is to tell a story. For this assignment we had to tell a story about us. We could also do it on a thing we like or things we don’t like. I decided to do mine on how to make french toast. There we seven slides. The fist and last one were already decided because they have to be the tittle slide and the closing slide that left me with five slides to work with. I broke down making french toast into five steps. I made it while taking pictures to put in the slide show. The next day I put the pictures on the slides and wrote something like a script. I was worried that if I wrote a script I would go over time so I wrote a short bit about each of the steps in the speaker notes and tweaked it until I found something that sounded good, was not to long or to short and something relativity easy to memorize since we were only given a week to do this project. Today I presented, I was very hesitant and first, but then I just went for it. During the beggining of the Ignite I was nervous, but as I went a long I think I got less nervous and it started to sound better. Here why don’t you check it out for yourself:

Debate Unit

A little while ago my fellow classmates and I started a unit in reading, it was debate. We were already in in reading groups soon our reading groups would become our debate groups. Every group decided on a topic my group decided to do, Should We Drink Tap or Bottled Water? After this everyone did research on the pros of water bottles and the con of them. We did the same thing with tap water. Once we did a little research we decided who would be on the tap water side of the argument and who would be on the bottled water side of the debate. My group consisted of Avery, Dani, Barbara and Hana. We where the only five person group which meant one side of the argument would have three people on it while the other side only had two people on it. Even after doing research everyone in my group wanted to do bottled water except Barbara. I decided that I would be on tap water with Barbara. We also wanted the teams to be fair. Once we were in our groups we did even more research, but this time only pros of the topic you are doing and con of the other topic.  We did a practice debate and it went well. We collected pictures to make our debate stronger. Barbara my debate partner went on vacation a week early, which meant I didn’t have a partner. So Hana was kind enough to switch over to my side of the debate. We had to regroup a little and I had to teach her a couple of things, but it wasn’t that hard. We did our formal debate yesterday. I think it went pretty well, but we could have done better. Why don’t check it out for yourself:

Coding – #3

Hello everyone, today I made another coding project! Once again I used Tynker this was the final project I can do on Tynker. It was super fun and interesting I learned a lot of things about coding from using Tynker. I told you guys that I would make a game, so just like I promised I made a game. I did not really follow the instructions what I did was I took the basic elements that  they gave me and reprogrammed it to make it so you can play another game. Part of the reason I did this was because I didn’t understand what the original point of the game was. The way you play the new game I made is: You hit the play button a ball will drop down and you need to try to keep it up using the platform. You can move the platform both ways using the arrow keys. To move the platform use the right arrow and left arrow on your keyboard. This game was a lot of fun to create although it was tricky and I faced many challenges it was all worth it because now I have a really cool game that I made myself! Why don’t you guys try mine out and then make your own:

Coding – #2

Today I made another code. I used Tynker again, Instead of a rock band I made a googly eyes game. I coded it so when the games starts the right eye follows you mouse when you are ready you click the up arrow on your computer and it moves the mouth back and fourth. The goal of the game is to have the eye try to keep up with the mouth. It was kind of hard to come up with this idea once I got the basic code down it was tricky to figure out how the elements work. From working on Tynker I have noticed that it is hard to make sure all the actors work together, like you can’t just fosuce on one actor and expect the other actors to not interfere. This was a fun code to work on because it is my first game. It really isn’t a game, but it is a start. I hope to work on more game codes. I like making game codes because you get to use a lot of creativity and you can customize it and make it unique. Here is the game I made, I hope you have fun playing it!

Coding – #1

Today my teacher told my peers and I that we would have to create at least fours pieces of code. I loved this idea. We have to use Scratch or Tynker to create the code, we have to use the two websites at lest once, so for example I can’t do all my code on Scratch, but I could do three on scratch and one on Tynker. I decided that I would be a good idea to start with Tynker because it gives you tutorials then lets you add other things into the basic elements that they helped you create. I made a rock band for my first project. When the actor is clicked it plays its song that I programmed it to play then it stops playing it and leaves the stage background so you can no longer see it or hear it. This was a fun code to start off with and I feel like I had a lot of freedoms, but a couple of guidelines to help me a long the way. This took some work and I had to tweak it several times, but in the end it all worked out. Why don’t you check it out and after watching what I created hopefully it will inspire you to make a code as well!

Overall Thoughts and Feelings – Rube Goldberg #7

Through out this project I have felt very different emotions. When we were designing I just wanted to start building and was very impatient. When it was time to build it was annoying because not everything that we wanted worked well with each other. When we were testing the Rube Goldberg I got frustrated because it didn’t work every time. The filming part wasn’t that hard although it was kind of hard t0 speak about the Rube Goldberg and how it works. Editing was super annoying because it took a long time to make everything look good and to make sure every thing was correct when it came to grammar.

In the end everything worked out and looked good. I was a little stressed during the time of the actual project but now that my work is completed I feel happy about what I have done and I know that now I can just enjoy watching the video. I personally thought that the project was kind of stressful, but it was also fun. During the project I was thinking when will we be done with this Rube Goldberg, but now I am happy to say that I really enjoyed this project and I would probably do something like this again. I am happy that I did it and I think that it was a great learning experienced for me! And here is our final iMovie video:

 

 

 

 

 

Overall Collaboration

During this project I think Dani and I worked very well together. Whenever we came to a spot where disagreed we compromised or tested both ideas out and used the one that worked better. We only argued once and the answer to the argument was found quickly. I have always know that Dani and I worked well together, but I never thought we would argue as little as we did.

I am happy we didn’t argue that much because if we did we wouldn’t get that much work done. Since we worked so well together we finished the project quickly and it still looked good and worked well. When we argued it happened during the building and designing part of the project. I expected that we would argue the most during this time because I knew with the ideas and we wouldn’t agree with every thing the other person thought should be in the machine.

Something that helped us was videos and articles. We got inspired by them and that helped us to come up with steps. We think that this caused us to barley argue because when we saw or read about something that worked well we got excited and tried to recreate their idea to make it our own.

Like I said in the begining we worked super well together and that helped us have a great Rube Goldberg and to have an amazing project overall!

 

 

Editing – Rube Goldberg #5

When Dani and I first started to edit we were nervous because we didn’t know how it would turn out. We didn’t really know where to start so, we discussed what we needed like: An intro, the fails, the sucsess, the slo mo and the credits. We started by putting that in an iMovie and then added thing along the way. My brother Kyle showed us where to get things we wanted to put in the movie and we weren’t sure where it was like if we wanted a curtain background, but didn’t know where to find it he would help. We wanted our movie to be very creative and entertaining so we added in some special things to make it unique. When we put the video in slow-motion it was kind of blurry so we chose to re film it. Personally I thought that the most annoying part of editing was the credits because we needed to make sure that they rolled at just the right speed so someone could read them, but not so slow that people get bored watching them. Once we got the basics on the iMovie I thought it was pretty easy because we could add our own special things in.

I loved editing although it got annoying at times. I really like how it turned out and I also think that is kind of cool to think about how Dani and I had footage and turned it into an amazing short filming. Even though I don’t really like to edit for some reason this really apealed to me. Maybe it was because I love the project so much?!

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