Month: March 2022

Refugee Question and Answer

rmian29 on

While Listening to Refugee by Alan Gantz, my classmates had a few questions and I have some of the answers to the questions.

The first question is if the hotel landlords and owners let Syrians stay, why would they talk so disrespectfully about them? 

I think that The Owners of the hotels let Sirians stay for the money. I don’t think that they liked the Sirians, they probably just knew that refugees are coming and found it as an opportunity to basically force or leave the refugees no choice but to pay for the hotels because the Refugees are desperate and the hotel owners probably know that other hotel owners are going to make them pay too. most hotel owners are just taking advantage of war and people who have no choice, which is a really bad thing to do. Instead, they should have helped the refugee, like Mr. Nasser.

Why is Mahmoud’s father keeping him from getting help? They had no place to stay or sleep.

I think that Mahmoud’s father doesn’t want to have help because he doesn’t want to accept defeat. He probably feels like because he is the man of the family, he should protect his family. he doesn’t want to accept defeat because he feels that he will lose his honor. he might also think that his family is depending on him and will be disappointed. he might also be embraced because Mr. Nassan is a man also and Mahmoud’s father doesn’t want a man – who is older tan him – have to see him need help.

Rube Goldberg #1

rmian29 on

In class – and at home – we are working on our Rube Goldberg. a Rube Goldberg is a complex machine that performs a simple task. so far I have my sketch and I have the actual machine complete. my machine might not be the final idea though. the ending doesn’t work that well but I am positive that I will figure it out. I am working with my twin sister on this problem because I think it will be very helpful to have a partner because you can discuss problems and have more ideas. the simple task that we are going to complete is to feed our dog a treat.

when we finished our project, we both felt very accomplished. I was definitely happy. I felt like I had a brick lifted from my back. I was practically smiling from ear to ear – and when I told my parents, they were practically smiling from ear to ear too. when we were working though, it wasn’t the same. I felt really mad and frustrated when an idea wouldn’t work – and that happened A LOT! in the end, I loved my idea and I am excited to try and make it better and work about 99% of the time.

my favorite part of my Rube Goldberg is probably the beginning. the beginning is some sort of pully. It is not exactly a pully but it kind of works as one. basically, you have to open a door, pulling a string attached to it. the string lifts a tube with a gulf ball in it. the gulf ball rolls out and hits a lot of dominos. I really like the setup with that idea but I can’t take credit for it. it was Camilla that was the designer for that idea. I don’t really have a least favorite part of my Rube Goldberg. I love all our ideas and even though some don’t work that well, they are amazing ideas and we will somehow make them work.

It was really hard to come up with our Ideas. we had to do a lot of brainstorming. our ideas were great when we first had them but they would only work about 50% of the time. we had to tweak our ideas and add more parts to make our ideas work all the time.

we had a lot of parts. at some points, I got so excited about using all of them that I forgot about other parts. in reality, we only added a few our the parts that we had. I was really surprised that we had as many parts. basically, all of the parts that we found were in a big closet in the basement.  the closet was full of junk and while some people who are just taking a quick look at it would describe it as a closet full of junk, I could see it as a closet full of machine parts.

in our Rube Goldberg, we used 5 simple machines, but we repeated a lot of them.  we had 3 inclined planes, 2 pulleys, 1 wheel and axel, 1 wedge, and 1 lever. so technically we have 8.

we had a lot of different sketches but we thought that this one is the best.

 

Rube Goldberg #2

rmian29 on

My Rube Goldberg is finally done! I finished the machine part- which meant distorting a really cool idea because it didn’t work- and finished the video which was really hard too because I did my Rube Goldberg with my twin and twins fight a lot. The whole experience was frustrating and also really exciting and fun to try and figure out what to do for each part. In the end, we ended up with THREE pulleys, and I thought that that one was going to e the simple machine that we had the least!

The biggest challenge that we faced was the end. for starters, it was really hard to come up with an idea. when we were finally able to come up with our idea, it didn’t work that well. we then had to come up with another idea which wasn’t as cool. then we had a problem with that idea because the ball that we used didn’t fall into a cup. we then had to change the design a little more to make it work. one the sunny side, because we worked so hard on making the end work so well, we only had 10 tries.

we know have 3 pulleys, a lot of inclined planes, and 1 wheel and axel. I think w did a pretty good job of adding simple machines in the right places and were where necessary. the hardest simple machine that we tried to fit in was the lever. I know that might sound crazy to some people but it is true. actually, our last part was the lever and it didn’t work so we had t get rid of it. we changed it to a pully, which worked really well.

our task was giving our dog charlie a treat. finding a way to do that was challenging but after some brainstorming and a few mess-ups, we had a great idea. it was to lift a cup with a treat under it, revealing the treat. our dog was really annoyed when he was waiting for his treat for a long time. he caused a lot of trouble when we wanted him to stay in one place because he is still sort of a puppy so he is not that patient.

overall I am very proud of this project and how we made it. we did a good job with stuff like coming up with ideas and tried to include the other’s ideas somewhere in the machine. I feel like a thing that we could improve on is not fighting over the silliest of things when we were doing the project like whether or not it would work or if we had to add an extra thing. I would like to thank my mom and dad for helping me with filming and helping me to not get really frustrated when something didn’t work and to instead make it better.