This week in tech we learned about bread boards. In class we are using bread boards to light up LED lights. I couldn’t figure out how to make make it work with the parallel pattern. Making the lights parallel can help make the bulbs brighter with just on battery. We also learned that if you wire it wrong the LED can explode. Working with the bread boards has been fun and I can’t wait to learn more.
yesterday in tech we learned about atoms. Everything is made up of atoms, from trees to buildings. Atoms are extremely small and in order to see the atoms in a grape fruit it would have had to be as big as the earth. In the center of atom is the nucleus the nucleus is ever smaller than an atom, if you blew up an atom to the size of a football field the nucleus would only be the size of a marble. All around the nucleus is just nothing, there is nothing around the nucleus. I thought that this was really interesting, because does that mean we are made of nothing? I cannot wait to learn more about this next week.
In tech we have learned about cams, a cam is a almost like a wheel and axle. A cam is used in automatons and can be found everywhere. From car engines to the 240 year old boy automation. Cams come in all shapes and sizes, each shape of a cam can do different thing. For example a circular cam can be used to make a moving caterpillar, and with more complicated cams you can make many more things, like a moving swan.
this week in tech we were building levers. I decided to make a trébuche (the second one in the tutorial). For extra credit we could make it into a game. In my game you have to try to launch a mini marshmallow into a cup. I tested trying to launch it into my mouth and catching but I almost choked, I also tried to make it a dog treat launcher seeing as my dog is really dog at catching toys and treats in his mouth, but that was also a fail he didn’t really get it. So the cup was a better option. It was a fun challenge and I’m glad I figured it out in the end.
This week I was helping my friend with a school project. Her assignment was to recreate a castle or monument in Minecraft and write an essay about it. She chose the Castle Boo in Sweden. This relates to tech because we were working on using red stone in the castle entrance and rigging it with things like trick floors. Using red stone is kind of like coding but in Minecraft. This is because there are command blocks that you can type code into. In the end the model of the castle turned out amazing and was really fun to make. I hope to be able to complete similar projects.
In the past few days it has been snowing a lot. At my house we got over 20 inches of snow. We have recently moved to a house in the woods, since we finally have the space my brother and I decided to build and igloo. Our first attempt was to hollow out a mound of snow the snow plow made. This did not work the structure was all wrong and after the second day of snow it collapsed. We continued to work on it trying to improve the design but nothing was working. After a few days we came up with the idea of packing down snow in a mold then using it as a brick this is working much better and the design is much sturdier. Our hope is to finish the igloo within the next week or two.
Capstone is finally over, and I think that I did a good job on my considering the circumstances. I choose to do my capstone in the form of a ted talk. I chose this because I had never done a ted talk before and I thought it might be fun, it turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. My favorite part of capstone was putting together the slide show and choosing the pictures, I put a lot of work into making it look good and go with what I was saying. In the end I wound up getting rid of a lot of pictures and changing a lot of things. I had a lot of trouble finding the pictures I needed so I wound up having to take a few pictures from books. Another challenge that I faced was with the script and revising. I love to write but this was really hard, especially since I wasn’t in school. I am really nervous about sharing my project. Now looking back I would have done a different topic, but now I have ideas for any future projects.
For my capstone I interviewed Allen Just, he works in Environmental Medicine & Public Health at Mount. Sinai. He was able to answer all of the questions I had for him about my topic. I interviewed him because I knew that he would probably be able to answer most of my questions. It was actually easier than I thought to get an interview because he was my old neighbor. So I was able to just call him and ask the questions. A challenge that I had with the interview was coming up with questions. I was having trouble coming up with questions that would be really really helpful, otherwise i wouldn’t be able to use some of the answers to help me with my Capstone project. The most helpful thing that I learned from this interview is that there are a lot of books on this topic so that was helpful to my research.
Here is a picture of the person I interviewed:
My class and I just started capstone! I am so excited! Capstone is a project that the fifth graders do at the end of the year. My project is going to be about plant based eating. The main question That I am researching is “what are the positive impacts of plant based eating” and my sub questions are
already knowing a little bit about my topic was really helpful with picking my main inquiry question. That made it so that I chose a question that nobody had the answer to yet. One of the challenging things about choosing a main question to research is choosing just one. There were tons of things I could have researched with my topic but eventually I narrowed it down to what are the positive impacts of plant based eating.
As a learner I know that I usually learn best when I read or listen to things more than once, project based learning or if I can experience what I am learning about that’s why I decided to become a weekday vegetarian for this project. That means that I am a vegetarian but only during the week on the weekends I can eat meat. I thought this was a good choice because I can’t go out to the store all the time and get ingredients for vegetarian dishes due to the coronavirus pandemic so this was a good compromise. I can’t wait to work on this project some more!
On September, Friday the 13th it was a perfectly normal day at Heathcote Elementary School in Scarsdale New York. Kids were waiting in the halls for the bell to ring then they heard it. It wasn’t the bell it was the fire alarm.
A 5 grader here at Heathcote Morgan Greco says “ When I got to school I saw the teachers and students flooding out of the school I thought it was an assembly or something but then I heard the ringing and saw the flashing lights.”
The cause is still unknown. Some students think that someone must have pulled the fire alarm while others think that since it was Friday the 13th it was just bad luck. But some students don’t think it was any of those things 5th grader, Kaitlyn Shadroff thinks “ It must have been smoke coming from the kitchen or something, I don’t think it was bad luck or a student’s fault.”
Many students thought that there actually was a fire in the school, 5th grader, Sara Mayer says “ I wasn’t really sure but the expressions on the teacher’s faces shoed this wasn’t planned”
Well, this was one strange event here at Heathcote elementary school ( in Scarsdale N.Y) that left everyone to dumfound. And looking for answers.
As Morgan Greco says “ this one a crazy event though we will get over it.”