Author Archives: mregenstreif24

Independent reading project

Red Scarf Girl by Ji-Li Jiang

Theme topics – What themes pop out of the text? Why is this important? How does it connect to the rest of the text or what is currently taking place?

The themes that pop out are family. This is important because Ji-Li has to choose whether to lie to her government to save her dad who had literally done nothing wrong (and suffer the consequences), or to stay loyal to the government. Ji-Li is very close-knit knit to her family and she made the morally right choice to not lie. The downside of her mistake was that she was sent to the fields to work long, back-breaking days picking wheat, and her grandma now has to sweep the streets as punishment. Word also got out that her grandpa was a landlord, and people were angry and rude to Ji-Li because he was rich. Even though he had been dead for over thirty years, it was still wrong to people. More and more of their stuff is taken from their house. “What other people do is a totally different question,” said Ying Lan-lan. “Other people don’t have a landlord grandfather and a rightist father.They don’t need to remold themselves.” (page 101) This is an example of how badly Ji-Li gets treated just because her long-dead grandpa was a landlord, and her father is a rightist (which I don’t think is even true).

It connects to the rest of the text because Ji-Li’s family had supposedly done something wrong. And because of that, she’s getting punished for something that isn’t even her fault in the first place. However, Ji-Li still loves her family (except her grandpa now). This shows that staying true to your family is almost always the right thing.

This also sort of connects to things that are currently happening. It is important to stay close to your family in and out of hard times. Especially during the coronavirus. Families can get through anything together.

Capstone Post #6: Working on my Final Project

YES! WE’RE ALMOST DONE WITH CAPSTONE!!! I don’t want to sound happy it’s done… but well, I’m pretty glad it’s just over with… but that sounds like the same thing… ANYWAY, I’m super happy I pretty much got my WHOLE CAPSTONE PROJECT done with! I’m done with my main inquiry question, my sub-questions, my first, second, third, fourth and fifth Capstone blog posts. My first one was about choosing a topic. I was deciding between How Cell Phones Work and Future Transportation. I finally came to Future Transportation, with the moral support and the help of Ms. Cooper.

I talk about three different types of future transportation: the Hyperloop, driverless cars, and tunnels. The Hyperloop is kind of a tube or a pod that people are in while it goes.  Going up to 760 miles per hour, Elon Musk was the one that created the Hyperloop and other types of transport (I don’t really feel like naming, sorry).

Then, one of the other types of transports, the driverless car, have a speed limit on the road of 90 miles per hour (but can be pushed higher).There are different companies who make driverless cars. Some are made by Toyota, and other car companies I don’t want to name, and then, Google actually makes driverless cars.

And finally, the last type of future transportation I’m going to be talking about are Tunnels, which are made by The Boring Company. A car in a Tunnel can go up to 124 miles per hour, but not the car itself. The car is on this little platform, slightly bigger than the car, and the platform is connected to the floor of the tunnel, and the platform, with the car on it, brings the car wherever direction the car needs to go.

When I was finished with my research, I brought all my notes together and answered my sub-questions and main inquiry question.  Here’s a link to see my main inquiry question if you want… just click here.

 

After that, I saw other classmates starting their presentations. So I started, excited to put on all my information on there but turns out, you have to memorize the whole entire scripts. Script? Yes, we have to do a script. I spent about… maybe… say, a week? Finally, I finished. Since my script was SO LONG, specifically five pages long, it took a while to cut the script into medium/small sized paragraphs and stick them onto index cards. A whole DAY.

And finally, YES, finally, I did a run-through with Ms. Cooper. In case you didn’t know, I’m doing a TED talk. Those are supposed to be around, say, eight minutes? Mine was over eleven minutes. As you probably know, I had to cut some of the information that was unnecessary. All that beautiful work gone… WAAH. I’m kidding I don’t really care. Anyways, Ms. Cooper gave me hard paper so it would take less time to set it up. I just have to put the hard paper in the printer and BOOM. Print my script.

Then, I just have to memorize my script, once it’s done. Practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, and more practice, even though we only have a week to memorize our whole script, and then present. I think I also have to make a buisness card,, I’m not actually sure if it’s optional or not, though. I can’t do the hard paper thing today because I forgot the hard paper at school. Sorry, Mc. Cooper, if you’re reading this now.

Overall, I’m so excited I almost got my Capstone Project done. CAPSTONE ROCKS! WHOO!

Capstone Post #5: Answer to Main Inquiry Question and Sub Questions

I spent a LOT of time working on my Main Inquiry Question and my Sub Questions. My Main Inquiry Question is “What are the types of future transportation being explored and what impacts will they have on SOCIETY?”

First of all, there are many different types of future transportation in the world, but I’m only going to talk about three. One type is called the Hyperloop. Going up to 760 miles per hour, the Hyperloop is proposed mode of passenger and freight transportation that will propel a pod-like vehicle through a reduced-pressure tube that would exceed airliner speed. The pods would accelerate to cruising speed gradually using a linear electric motor and glide above their track using passive magnetic levitation or air bearings. The tubes could also go above ground on columns or underground, eliminating the dangers of grade crossings.

The Hyperloop will cost a lot. More than you can imagine. A million. Whoops! I MEANT SEVERAL BILLION dollars due to construction, development and operation costs. This hypothetical high-speed mode of transportation would have the following characteristics: immunity to weather, collision free, twice the speed of a plane, low power consumption, and energy storage for 24-hour operation.

Musk’s vision also sees the Hyperloop as a 400-mile long network of above-ground tubes with very low air pressure inside them, which allows bus-sized capsules to travel through those tubes at near supersonic speeds.

 

Another type of transportation are self-driving cars. The speed limit for this is around 90 mph, but it can be pushed higher. People will no longer have to spend thousands of dollars on a new car. Instead, when they need to get somewhere, they’ll simply call for a driverless taxi.

Self-driving cars could completely change the way Americans think about where they live. Traveling from suburb to city center will become much less tiring. People will no longer have to do the driving themselves. Because of that, people will feel less need to live where they work. They’ll no longer be forced to pay the high rents and taxes common in big cities. 

  But a con with driverless cars are that they’re guided by computers. Those computers rely on information about roads that’s loaded into them. If something on the road changes, they are lost. For instance, they wouldn’t obey a new stop sign. They also have problems figuring out when objects such as bits of paper garbage are harmless. For that reason, they can change course suddenly for no reason. Such sudden shifts can make crashes more likely.

Another con is that since they’re guided by computers, a big con is cyber security. Terrorists can hack into them and make them do not what they’re supposed to.

But some pros are that future cars will be less damaging to the environment. Part of the reason is that they will be powered by electricity, which generates less carbon and pollution than gasoline, and can be produced by nuclear, solar or other environmentally-friendly fuel sources. It would be more accessible to more people. People will have more mobility. And now, the people who don’t have access to that — the children, the elderly, and the disabled will be able to travel. Future cars will be less damaging to the environment. Part of the reason is that they will be powered by electricity, which generates less carbon and pollution than gasoline, and can be produced by nuclear, solar or other environmentally-friendly fuel sources. The cars will be lighter. And they will choose the shortest routes to get to where we want to go. And instead of gas they will use electricity which is more efficient than gas. The energy will come not from burning hydrocarbons but from a cleaner source (electricity).

Another pro is that disabled people, who have to rely on public transportation or assistance from others to get around, could reap the benefit of self-driving cars with new freedom and enhanced mobility, as suggested by the New York Times.

Another type of future transportation are tunnels. Tunnels are a way of getting somewhere, but underground. To solve the soul-destroying traffic, roads have to go 3D, which means either flying cars or tunnels. Unlike flying cars, tunnels are weatherproof, out of sight and won’t fall on your head.

A large network of road tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city, no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels). The keys to making this work is increasing tunneling speed and dropping costs by a factor of ten or more.

They’re fast to dig, and low cost tunnels would also make Hyperloop adoption viable and enable rapid transit across densely populated regions, enabling travel from New York to Washington DC in less than thirty minutes.

Why tunnels? To alleviate traffic, transportation corridors, like the buildings that feed into them, must expand into three dimensions. One option is to go up with flying cars. However flying cars have issues with weather, noise, and generally increase anxiety levels of the people below them.

The other option is to go down and build tunnels. The benefits are:

  • There is no practical limit to how many layers of tunnels can be built, so any level of traffic can be addressed.
  • Tunnels are weatherproof.
  • Tunnel construction and operation are silent to anyone on the surface.
  • Tunnels don’t divide communities with barriers and lines.

The reason nobody has done this before is that currently, tunnels are really expensive to dig, with some projects costing as much as one billion dollars per mile.

A lot of car companies, for instance, Tesla, like to make their cars green. Not the color, as you know, but it means it’s good for the ecosystem. There will be less pollution and global warming.

 

Overall, there are three different types of common future transportation. The Hyperloop, which can go up to 760 miles per hour, self-driving cars, the speed limit on the street being 90 miles per hour but can pushed higher, and finally Tunnels, which is a way to enable people to drive somewhere other than the road.

Capstone Post #4

When the interview was completed, I looked for a company where I could see some of this technology, and that is thinking about how the technology should be in the future. My topic is Future Transportation, so in that case, where I went was an actual Tesla store in Brooklyn. It’s not a dealership, but is owned by the Tesla company itself.  It was a one hour drive from Scarsdale,  on 5/27/17, but it was worth it! We got to learn about a new technology which allows it to drive on automatic pilot, which allows the car to drive itself for a while. Also, it will be able to upgrade to be fully self-driving in a few years. For instance, that will allow the car to drive someone to work and drive back home by itself.

The employee I interviewed was named David Rozins. He taught us about different green cars (like electric cars, not the color) and what they can do. The Tesla drives on pure electric power. For instance, one model has  7,160 battery cells, which together equal one third of the body weight of the car. This one is heavier than most cars, weighing about 4,800 pounds. Most cars this size weigh about 4,000 pounds. Rozins said this makes the Tesla safer than other cars. Here’s some more information. Tesla’s have an electric motor on each axle of the chassis. That’s the frame of the car. It’s made of something called aluminum composite so it doesn’t rust. It also has no gears. It can speed up from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 2.5 seconds. There are other electric cars that are sold but this can go further without recharging.

But what was REALLY, SUPER FASCINATING was that he even allowed us to ride in it! The one we rode in had eight cameras and radar to sense what was around the car. On the inside, it was fascinating because instead of there being A LOT OF BUTTONS, there was a touch screen, even bigger than an ipad! And another thing is, instead of going to the gas station, your own home is like a gas station. You charge your car with some called superchargers, which is kind of like the fuel or gas. Rozins said one of the problems in developing electric car technology is having enough places around the country to charge it up. Tesla has built hundreds of places around the country, and around the world, to charge their cars.  And guess how long it takes to charge? To charge it fully, it takes eight hours and go 350 miles without recharging.

Anyway, back to riding the car. It was so cool! You know when you ride your regular car, there’s a small window at the roof of the car? Well, in this car, the window took up the WHOLE ENTIRE ROOF OF THE CAR! So it was awesome when you looked up at the roof and what you saw was a big, clear window leading you looking into the sky. And finally, when he actually drove it, there is an option to put the car into launch mode. Launch mode is a button where the car goes super fast! So fast that when he drives it, your head is pushed back, pressing the back seat of the car. It’s basically like a rollercoaster! Well, it feels like it.

Here are some pictures of the Chassis:

 

Here are some pictures of the car we rode:

          

Here are some pictures of the touch-screen inside of the car:

       

And finally, here is a picture of the camera located on the side of a car:

 

Overall, my site visit was so fun. But we also got info on my topic. I’m so glad we came!

 

Capstone Post #3: Interview

It was really hard to find someone to interview. I was told by my dad that most people who work for Tesla, which is what Ms. Cooper suggested, is actually way too far away like in California or Virginia or stuff like that. So my dad wanted me to have my interview by Skype but not in person, which I disagreed. I wanted to see the person in real life, because it would be a cooler interview, and it would feel more real.

Finally we had to agree on Skype because Ms. Cooper was actually okay with it. I was like, “Oh, okay. FINE” and so we did it by Skype. We  had our interview on 5/20/17. (Sorry Ms. Cooper that I didn’t tell you earlier. My dad told me really late…)

But I was SO nervous. What if  there were awkward silences if I ran out of questions? What if I got embarrassed because I stuttered too much? These are some reasons I thought about why I might not want to do it by Skype. I don’t actually know if there would be any differences, though.

The person I interviewed was called Ali Maleki. He is the Executive Director of a company called Nexteer which makes parts for cars, specifically around how it steers, and sells them to big car companies that assembles them. Maleki works on next-generation products, which are what Nexteer will sell in coming years. Specifically, he works on features that will help cars drive automatically.

He likes working there, because Nexteer is one of the smaller car part manufacturers, which allows him to do more interesting work to help it grow.

“In 10 years there will be a higher level of self-driving cars. Today people who are elderly or disabled can’t drive. They have to depend on other people. They have very limited transportation and in this country public transportation is very poor. Self-driving vehicles that can drive in a limited area, that can enable people to go out to the corner store or to the movies. The way that Uber comes to pick you up today, self driving cars would be like Uber but without the driver. You use your phone or whatever device you use to hail a car to pick you up.

“We would see a lot more people that are sleeping or texting or reading on the highways because the cars are driving themselves. All these driver distraction issues, where people are texting and rear ending other cars, getting into accidents, we would have fewer of those. You don’t have to worry and can just let the car drive itself.

“The traffic flow may be better because these cars are not breaking too hard, following in an orderly way, and there may be more than one person in the car because the driverless car can pick up more than one person. That means you will need fewer cars on the road. That will help the traffic,” says Maleki.

“In 20 or 25 years”, says Maleki, “This country will not invest a lot in public transportation. So people will take one of these cars to destinations that they might fly to today because they don’t have to worry about driving and can work, study or sleep while the car drives itself.

“The traffic flow may be better because these cars are not breaking too hard, following in an orderly way, and there may be more than one person in the car because the driverless car can pick up more than one person. That means you will need fewer cars on the road. That will help the traffic. “

In 20 or 25 years this country will not invest a lot in public transportation. So people will take one of these cars to destinations that they might fly to today because they don’t have to worry about driving and can work, study or sleep while the car drives itself.

 

That may change the hotel industry because the cars may be equipped with little beds to allow people to sleep while they are travelling. That could also change the signs and advertisements on the highways because no one would be looking up at them as they do today. They would be wireless messages pushed to your devices while you’re travelling. The taxi and rental car businesses may change . Car rental companies will manage these shared vehicle networks. They will be leasing these cars or having these subscription type systems where to pay a certain amount of money a month and you get a certain number of miles you can travel. “Your generation will probably not own a car. You will pay a monthly fee and have a reservation any time you want.” The cars will likely be electric.

 

Capstone Post #2: Choosing a Main Inquiry Question and Choosing Sub Questions

Now that I have chosen my topic, Future Transportation, I knew I would have to come up with a Main Inquiry Question.  A Main Inquiry Question is basically the big question you’re focusing on for Capstone. BUT, you’ll also need some Sub Inquiry Questions. That’s basically the same thing as the other one I kept talking about, but you don’t focus on it as much.  However, you cannot make your Inquiry Questions something easy to answer or something you can just search up. For instance, “What is future transportation?” can’t be an inquiry question because you can just look it up, and you should know what transportation is anyway.  If you don’t, that’s just sad.

My Main Inquiry Question is ‘What are the kinds of future transportation being explored and what impacts will they have on society?’ For this, I will explain a few vehicles, well, being explored or looked at and how it will change society.

I also have five Sub Questions. The first one is “What kinds of future transportation will people use?”                          My second Sub Question is “What are the pros of future transportation?” and my third is “What are the cons of future transportation?”.  My fourth is “What technology will be used in these new inventions?” and my fifth is “How is future transportation impacting the environment?”.  I’m so excited to research further!

 

Capstone Post #1: Choosing a Topic

Yes! Capstone is finally here!  But among fun comes responsibility.  In the younger grades sometimes I would see the fifth graders do things related to Capstone, and I thought to myself, “Hmm! When I’m a fifth grader what should I do for Capstone? Meh, I’m too young for this. I can figure it out later. It’ll be really easy to think of it..” Turns out I was wrong. Choosing a topic is SUPER HARD. But then one day, LIGHTBULB!!!!!

The topic that I’m doing is Future Transportation. For instance, flying cars and hover boards and other cool vehicles like that. I’m doing it because I was interested in doing new stuff other than cats, so I was think about maybe a place? No, I didn’t want to do that. But then I thought “Hey, maybe something that could TAKE me to a place!” But of course, I didn’t want to do regular vehicles, because that’s kinda boring. So I decided to do FLYING VEHICLES, OR OTHER COOL STUFF LIKE THAT! The first thing that I actually thought of was “How Cell Phones Work” and told my parents and Ms. Cooper and she approved. My parents also kind of did, but they said that I should think of something even better. That’s how I thought of my topic.

I chose this topic because I’m actually kind of interested in hover boards and other cool stuff like that.  Once I thought of Future Transportation, I thought it was gonna be super cool! And it is.  But I’m a little concerned because I don’t know if there are going to be a lot of resources I can look at.  But I don’t have to worry  about that now. For now, I only have to work on choosing a good topic.  End of story.

YES! LAST RUBE GOLDBERG POST!

OH YEAH, MR. KRABS!!! This is my last post! Yay. I’m so happy this is over, because BELIEVE ME, this project was SO STRESSFUL. But it was fun…ish. Mostly stressful.

I’m guessing the most annoying and/or stressful attempt was when I was so pissed off, that I flipped out and kinda punched the domino roughly, moving the box as well. In Arianna’s post, you know that she may have described me as “…so upset that she launched into SUPER INSANE CAPTAIN FALCON MODE!!!”

This project was super hard and stressful. One problem for part of it was that Arianna need chill and I had too much of it. Sometimes, the other way around. I don’t really know what to write anymore so I’ll just keep blabbering on about stuff that happened before we finished…

Another problem was that we were in fantasy land for the beginning part of it so we kept coming up with ideas like “Hey, let’s get a mallet and make it hit an empty bucket causing it to fall and hit a heavier bucket into an even bigger bucket!”, or something like “Yo Arianna, let’s make a bucket randomly tip over while both ends are tied up by a rope!”

I REALLY don’t know what else to say so I’m thinking I’m just going to end my last post. Overall, this project was fun, annoying, stressful and creative.

Just Another Rube Goldberg Post

When we came up with our 1st idea for our Rube Goldberg, we thought it would be easy. Wow, it’s so incredible at how wrong we were. The end of it was most impossible, it’s funny. We had to get a mallet to appear out of no where and hit an empty bucket, causing it to fall and hit a bucket with stuffed animals- then that bucket would fall into the biggest bucket of all: “DA BUCKET”. Lol. This tasks’ name was “OPERATION: Put Your Toys Away”.

Our original task was to get a bunch of stuffed animals into a random bucket. Ta-da. That was real stupid of us, because how does a useless, super light bucket fall over and knock a super heavy bucket filled with giant stuffed animals down? We tried about, actually, in ALL, 30 times before it eventually worked. 4 times we changed the whole idea. Now, the task is to get a duck into a bowl along with its only 2 friends. This task is much better cause its actually possible. This one’s name is “OPERATION: 1 Ducky Left…”

I’m really happy because we finished the whole thing and now it’s over with.