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Where I’m from

For our poetry festival at Heathcote School, our teacher assigned a poem that we had to write. It is called the where I’m from poem. It is all about your life and what you have. We got a packet for us to look at and read where I’m from poems and do an outline of your poem. I read a lot of these poems and they inspired me on what I should write about in my poem. I followed the outline and added a few extra things. Finally I had my whole poem typed up on the computer. After a meeting with my teacher and some more edits, my poem was ready to be printed. After I printed it I drew a little design and some of the things that I mentioned as my illustration.

 

Once I had my poem it was time to practice for when I was going to recite it in front of the green screen. When I first started practicing my script I stumbled a lot. Every time I practiced I got better. Soon I had my script down pretty well and was ready to do my green screen video. First, I had to pick a picture for my green screen. I picked a design but when I went back to looking for a better picture I decided that the picture of a spotlight was better. I then went to the green screen and took my video. It took two tries for me to get it perfect because the first one I stumbled a little, but the second one was good.

Here is the video:

Coding project 4

For my last coding project. I did another Scratch project. I wanted to do a catch game because it looked fun. I started with the tutorial. Then I added more baseballs. Now I had an original catch game. I then added a score and countdown. Once I was done I thought to myself how I can make it better. After playing some of my classmates games I thought that a two person catch game would be fun. But after a few games with some other people I noticed that one bowl one every time. I had to change that. I added different looking balls that have different values. I thought this would be a more free for all game. Once that was done I tried my game out, made the last few fixes and then published it.

Here it is:

Coding project 3

For my third project I decided to do a tynker project. I am not so good at tynker so I decided to keep it simple. I looked through the games and I liked the music game the best. The original game was already made for you so I just added some new characters. This game was really easy to make but, the annoying part was I kept forgetting to save it so I did it so many times. In the end I finally got it done and saved it.

Here it is:

Coding project 1

For my first project, I decided to do a simple Pong Game. I did this because earlier in the year I tried one and it totally failed. I wanted to make a successful Pong Game. First, I looked at my old Game and tried to figure out what was wrong. It was a whole big mess so I was going to try to make it neater this time. I did the tutorial first., and the game worked! Next, I just fixed the glitches. This was the hard part because I noticed them when I was trying out my game, but then I had to figure out how to fix them. I finally finished and my game was cleaner than any other Pong Game.

Here is the final Result:

Struggles

One of my biggest struggles was finding out what was wrong with my other Pong Game. I looked over every script and couldn’t figure out why, so I just gave up and started a new one. Another one of my biggest struggles was making the ball bounce in a different direction every time. At first, it just went back and fourth and some other angles that I tried didn’t work but, finally I got it to work.

Debate

 

I had an interesting experience during my debate. During the research our group did really well. We got a lot of information and statistics. When it came to the deciding who is on either side we had some arguing. I was for zoos but Alex, Karine, and Noah were against. Finally, Alex came to my side. But, then Karine and Noah didn’t want to be together but we ended up getting them to agree. For practicing for our first debate we did fine but on the last day Noah had been out a lot so he wasn’t ready and Alex was out sick, so Karine and I did a one on one debate. That one didn’t go so well. But then we started preparing for our next debate.

First, we started out by getting a little more research. Then we wanted to practice but Noah was out so Alex and I just looked over our debate reasons and examples. One Noah came back I was out so we couldn’t practice again. This kept happening until break now most teams have gone and we haven’t even got one full practice in. The next few days after break Alex was out and then I was again after him. Mrs. Edwards really wanted us to go soon and so did everyone else. Finally, the next week we were all here. We only got two days to practice as a full group, and even though we weren’t so prepared we still went and got it over with. Here is our final debate and feedback:

 

Coding project 2

The Process

For my second project I decided to do another Scratch project. I thought that Scratch was easier to use and I liked the options it gave you better too. I decided to do a Hide and Seek game. The tutorial only gave me one character that acts like Wally does. After the tutorial I thought to myself how I can make it better.  First I decided to add obstacles to my game, but it was still way to easy. I have played arcade games where you had to hit the thing that lights up or something like that, so I decided to make it like that. First, I added more bears that didn’t look like Wally. Now my game was a bit harder. Next I wanted to figure out a way for you to win or lose. I made it so when the bears are clicked a you lose sign comes up. And when the score is six then a you win sign pops up. That was my biggest improvement so far. I then thought to myself that it wouldn’t be hard to just not click the bears and wait for Wally to show up in the middle of the screen, so I added a countdown. Now it is pretty hard to win this game. Finally, I added my finishing touches to fix the lags, check it out down below.

 

Struggles

Throughout the process I had a few struggles. One of them was Making the score go up one the second Wally was clicked. I had a few people try my game before I published it. One person’s score was five with one second to go. He clicked Wally but the score didn’t calculate because I had play sound pop and say you found me, before the code said to change score by one. This glitch caused some problems. Luckily I was able to figure this out and fix it. Another struggle was I had the building and the tree go away when the you lose or you win sign pops up. But, what happened was they left the screen and never came back even when the next round started. It took me a while to figure out that I needed to make them appear every time a new round starts. these were two of the struggles I went through during the process.

Our new Rube Goldberg – Blog post 5

We decided to make a new Rube Goldberg because we couldn’t make the other one in time. Our new one is nothing like the other one. I don’t think there is a step that is the same besides dominoes. We had to build this one very quickly. At first we made 9 steps and tried it out. It worked on the 5th try. We then said that we wanted to add a few more steps to make it more interesting. We haven’t tried this design yet but I think it won’t take long because nine of them have already worked.

 

 

Our Final Rube Goldberg – Blog Post 6

After all of the planning, fails and successes the Rube Goldberg unit has come to an end. Our final Rube Goldberg was 12 steps. We started with a plan of 14, but then we totally switched designs and started over. We first got the first seven steps working just so we knew we would only have to add one step. But instead we added two. We then had nine steps. This is a link to the video of the nine steps. (top)

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Once we got the first nine steps working we wanted to add more steps to make it even more impressive. We wanted to add them to the beginning so we didn’t interfere with the steps that worked. We added three steps, first I would drop a marble into a ramp then the marble would fall into two more ramps. The marble would then fall and hit another ball that was resting on two sticks. The ball will fall and science it is tied to a hook which is locked on to the string that is holding the zip line so the zip line doesn’t fall the ball pulls the rope away and the zip line releases. Even though it only took six tries, it was annoying because the zip line kept falling while we were setting up. We finally got it to stay. Here is the link to the video of the final Rube Goldberg. Overall I loved this unit and look forward to other projects just like this one.

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Changing Ideas Blog post 4

So far we have been doing our Rube Goldberg at my house. But our steps aren’t working. We have only 2 meetings left and we haven’t even got the first half of the steps working. After our meeting we decided to switch to his house and make a whole new design. This is a risky move to make because we are this far into the process. We didn’t write a sketch out for this idea. We immediately started building the machine. Hopefully we can do it.

Our first steps – Blog post 3

In a Rube Goldberg you have to have some steps. Our assignment was to have at least 8 steps. But William and I are making one that is 12 steps long. We haven’t made all of the steps yet but we have made a few. One of the steps that we have made is where a little robot called an Ozo Bot follows a line once a domino is pulled away and hits a domino. Another step is where a pool ball rolled down half of a maze made by Lincoln logs and that pool ball hits another one which finishes the maze. These are two steps that we have tried out and they worked.

These are links to the videos of them:

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