Today is my last day in technology. Overall, technology has been super fun. I personally love building things, so I really enjoyed this. Mr. Calvert has been such a good teacher. He helped out and taught me so many things like soldering, making switches, atoms, batteries, and so much more. I thought this class helped me with things like building, science, and measurement. I am super sad to leave technology. It was so fun, but I know I will love art as well. This is my last blog post, so I hope you learned about what I did in technology. Bye!
Now that I finished my drawing, it was time to make my flashlight. First I worked on my wires and circuit. Right away I measured my wires. The next thing I had to do was strip my wires. This meant I used a tool and took off the rubber part of the wire. After that, I hooked both ends of the wires that had been stripped. Then, it was time to create my circuit. This circuit was how I made the light turn on. I soldered my switch,battery,and wires all together. 2 of the wires were positive, and both of those had to touch the switch. The other wire was negative, and it was supposed to touch the battery and light. After I made my circuit, I had to cut my pipe. I used a saw to cut my pipes, which was a little scary, but turned out to be pretty fun. I cut it 2 ½ in. To match my drawing. After that was done, I had to drill holes where my light and switch were supposed to go. The bigger drill was for the light, and the smaller drill was for the switch. After I did all of that, I assembled my flashlight. Since I measured everything, it all fit perfectly. The last thing I had to do was decorate. This was to add a bit of personality to your flashlight.
Here is my flashlight:
We started working on switches. These were based on self driving cars. I hade to make 3 switches. The switches were supposed to act like self driving cars. We used tinfoil so that it would be conductive and work. The first switch made was like a seesaw. The next one was like a bouncy swing. The last one was another type of swing like switch.
In technology I soldered my piece. It was kind of scary, because I was scared I was going to burn myself. Two people already burned themselves, so it made it even worse. When I was soldering, It was 842º, and there was a soldering piece that went with it. The solder piece helped make the metal melt. After I finished soldering, it kept on breaking so Mr. Calvert helped me finish it. Overall, even though it was really scary sometimes, it still was a fun experience.
This is my soldering piece!
We started to talk about soldering the next day. The first thing we did was brainstorm our designs. We used a circle template. I chose to make a wave. The next thing we did was create our design on an app called Vectornator. It was hard to make it on that app because it didn’t exactly look like I wanted it too. Next we printed out our design and used wires to make our design. I just finished that step. The next step is to solder your design. I haven’t done that but I’m about too. Overall Soldering has super fun so far!
On the 3rd day, the Internet wasn’t working well so we decided to tackle the wooden Block challenge. Mr. Calvert put up 2 shapes on the board, (one easy and one hard) and we had to make it. It was important that you chose the right blocks, so it would be really sturdy and not fall down. The other people in my group were Devin and Ada. When we tried building it would fall down a lot of the times. It happened to other groups too. Some groups would get really close, but then it would fall down. At the end we managed to build the shape without it falling down! I think we were the only group that did that. Overall, it was a challenging but fun experience.
The next day, we played breakout EDU. It was like an escape room. There were 3 different locks we had to open. One of them had arrows, another had numbers and the last one had a word. There was also another lock that was for both teams. This lock helped you unlock the other ones. We had only 25 minutes, but both teams did manage to unlock all of them. The first one we unlocked was the arrows. The number, and lastly the word one. The other group finished first, but I still had a lot of fun!
I have been in technology class for 4 days. This is my quarterly and I have Mr. Calvert for my teacher. I have had a really good time so far! We have done lots of things and I’ve learned a lot too. First, one of the big things we talked about was safety. He talked a lot about indicients people have been through when they didn’t follow the safety rules. First he told us that we needed to tie our hair back. He showed a video of a guy who caught his hair on a power drill. It made him start bleeding! It wasn’t fun to watch. But I did learn a lot about safety!
