Paper Airplanes and the Forces of Flight

Overall, my paper airplanes were successful, but I can see where they could’ve been improved. My most successful one used the “Professional” design from Origami Way’s website. I originally chose it because it look simple enough to fold, but had a well-rounded description. It lived up to these expectations, but the real trick to its…

Properties + Manufacturing of a Bell

From small sleigh bells to boxing gongs, a bell obtains several physical properties while they are made. For example, the resilience of a bell is important because it gets hit with a mallet or ball bearing every time it is used. Resilience is defined as “a material’s ability to absorb energy and deform elastically.” If…

The Discovery of Batteries (#9)

I’m sure that you’ve used a battery before, probably without a second thought, but have you ever stopped to wonder how they came to be? Voltaic cells, also known as batteries, use a chemical reaction known as an oxidation-reduction reaction to create electricity and power the world around us. It all started almost two hundred…

Building an Electroscope (#8)

There is a good chance that you, like I, have tried rubbing a balloon against your sweater or hair and sticking it to a wall. This is pretty cool to play with, but have you ever thought about why this works? I hadn’t and that’s why I found this week’s technology project so interesting. A…

Building a Catapult

Last week we learned about levers. Before last week I knew that I used levers in shovels, scissors, and other devices, but I had no idea that there were different classes of levers or that there is so much science behind them! What was even more interesting and fun than the lesson though, was the…

Final Blog Post – Swift Playgrounds

My favourite assignment that I have completed this quarter was Swift Playgrounds “Learn to Code 1.” Through that assignment, I learned a lot about the building blocks of coding including functions, booleans, and else and while statements. I found that Swift Playgrounds made the basics of coding very accessible in a way that I had…

Transferring Energy

We use and transfer energy every day, just like I did many times over this past weekend. In this post I will give you an example of how I did so. To start, I used electrical kinetic energy to toast a slice of bread. The toaster transferred the electrical energy into kinetic thermal energy.  Then,…

Four Stash Sweep

My favorite activity from Learn to Code 1 was one called Four Stash Sweep. It wasn’t particularly challenging but there was a lot of code to write, so the hardest bit for me occurred when my code didn’t work as planned. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was wrong, but that…

Swift Playgrounds – Learn to Code 1

Overall, I though Swift Playgrounds’s Learn to Code program was a great way to learn the basics of swift coding. Compared to Scratch, Swift feels much more real, and I understand some of the key concepts much better after completing Learn to Code 1.  I enjoyed learning about For Loops, because I found that the…

What is Energy?

Today I am going to answer the question, what is energy? Basically, energy is the ability to do work, but there is so much more to it than that. It exists in many different forms, such as thermal, mechanical, chemical, electrical, gravitational, and various others. Slightly different from its forms, energy can be sorted into…