Magnificent Max

Yesterday we did an activity where we had to make a 3D shape out of tooth picks and something to hold them together. I used tooth picks and marshmallows. I decide to make a cube as my shape. The activity was to put books on it and see what happens after you put books on it. Mine completely collapsed, here is a picture of mine:

This week is the last week of the quarter so its the last week of tech. I was looking forward to making a flashlight and circuits and to finish soldering but were not going to do that. This week we started leaning about structural engineering. The most important thing in structural engineering is to pick out the best material for what you want to build. There are different qualities that different materials have. The most affective  shape to use when building is a triangle this shape is the best because it wont collaps.

This week we started learning about metals and batteries. One of the things that we did this week was watch a video about medals. I thought it was interesting. Some of the parts that I thought were interesting were the telescope where they had to rely on two once3s of gold, the whole process of making the bell, and that they could turn trash into steel alloy. Another part of a different lesson that I thought was cool was that when you charge your phone the charger is actually taking stuff away from the phone.

Although we are doing learning I still learned a lot about atoms. Some things that I thought were cool about atoms was that they are to small to for the naked eye to see them, and that too see them you have to magnify it down 1000 times. Another thing that I found cool was that most of the atoms is space, and our world is made up of atoms so that means most of our worlds is space. I learned about this in one of the lessons that’s we had.

Our school got cancelled so we are not doing soldering but we started our unit on atoms. Atoms are still a little confusing but I mostly get them. An atom is something that you can’t see because it is so small. The only way you can see an atom is by using a machine that feels the tip of the atom. It is like feeling around a dark room and ghetto girls and image for it. The lesson that I liked the best this week was the making a movie out of atoms. I liked it because it thought it was cool that they could do that even though you cant see an atom. Overall all I’m am doing good with the e-learning.

Right now we have finished  our automata unit and it is a project that you can do when your done with things. We are in our unit on soldering. I made my first design and I am in the process of soldering it. My design are the initials SF. When I used the solder for the first time today I was scared that I was going to burn myself. I had some trouble getting the parts that I was soldering together to stick. Overall I did a pretty good job.

We have started the process of making automates. The first thing we did was learn how to use the Vectornator app on our iPads. Wer had to use this to make our cam and followers. Here is mine:

The oddly shaped one is my cam and the circle is my follower. My cam is oddly shaped because of what I chose to be on the top of my automata. I chose to make a basketball going into a hoop. To make the cam and followers we had to laser cut them. My cam and follower came out smaller than I wanted it to be. While glueing my cams together I realized that the hole was in the wrong spot, so I had to reprint my cam.

The next step was to make the box that our cam and follower will go in. We had to glue the sides together. We used hot glue guns to glue them together. I have used a hot glue gun one time before. I burned myself on the glue. One problem that came up while I was gluing my box the sides weren’t aligned so I had to get that side cut off.

After that we had to glue our cams and followers together to make it stronger.