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.
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:
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!
When Dani and I met for the first time we didn’t really know where to start or what we were going to do. The only thing we knew was our task. We started to kind of piece together the last step and how it would work because it was the only thing we were sure we were going to do. This is all we really got done the first time we met. The second time we met we were determined to finish the last part of the sketch. We started to discuss ideas for the first part of the machine. By the third time we met we had already gotten part of the sketch done and we even started building part of the Rube Goldberg machine. We finished the rest of the sketch the third time we met. Overall I thought the sketching part of the project was pretty hard because to me it is hard to sketch something if I don’t have anything to sketch which is part of the reason we started to build the machine. We are happy with our sketch and think we will be able to follow it because it is practical and clear. We think we might need to revise it a little so, The sketch looks something like the machine.