This is my final blog post for my tech quarterly this year. I had a lot of fun in this class. Mr. Calvert is very nice and fun, and we got to do all sorts of fun activities and projects. Some of my favorites were the light switch, the crank, and the self-driving car switches. I like being able to create and build things, so this class suited me well. Also, Mr. Calvert taught us lessons about Physics, technology, and machines. Now, these lessons should have been boring because of their topic. But Mr. Calvert taught them with enthusiasm and excitement that spread to the whole class. He invited us to share insights and ideas and elaborated on them. He made the lessons very relatable and so we were intrigued. I don’t know about anyone else, but I looked forward to both hands-on days and neared days equally. Anyways, this was an exciting and fun class for me, and I’m glad I got to participate in it. See you all next year!

So, we have been learning about electricity and circuits lately. We did something with something called a breadboard, where we attached wires to little holes in this box to a battery and something called a resistor to create a flow of energy and make an LED light light up. Now we are moving on to a different project – we are making 3 different switches to create a flow of energy and electrons to simulate a Self Driving car. They are made of tinfoil to create the flow, and also cardboard, popsicle sticks, rubber bands, and so on. We put it all together with hot glue and tape. Also, we use cutting machines to cut the cardboard and sometimes even the popsicle sticks. I finished my 3 switches today, so we will begin attaching things like wires and batteries to them, and on Friday, we will play a game with them to simulate a self driving car. But that hasn’t happened yet, so I’ll have to wait.

So, I didn’t finish my crank on time during that unit, so I had to work on it the past few weeks, but I FINALLY finished it! It is kind of like the cam, you have to turn a wheel on the side that makes a little bar on the inside go round and round. But on this bar it curves to make a gap in the middle, and a pole is attached to that bar. When you turn the bar it makes the pole rise and fall from the top, but also rotate vertically. The whole thing is, once again, made of paper. I have had to come in during multiple lunches to finish it.

This week in tech, we are learning about atoms. One interesting fact is that atoms create a small, unseeable gap between objects and other objects. So, in reality, we are levitating. We are all made up of atoms. There have been many theories about what atoms look like over the centuries. Currently, it is thought that at the center of the atom, there is the small crunchy bit called the nucleus. Between the nucleus and the nucleus and the shell part, there is empty space, and in that empty space, there are protons and neutrons. The amount  of neutrons in an atom can change, which results in the different elements in the table of elements. But the amount of protons stay the same no matter what. The electrons in an atom can almost teleport around to different parts of the atom.

Two days ago, I finished my next Tech project, a light switch. When you pull a lever, it makes the lights turn on and off. You put it over your switch on your wall, and it might be different depending on what kind of switch you have. For example, you might have a flatter sort of switch, or a longer, smaller one, shaped almost like a lever. You might also have three switches side-by-side, in which case you would have to build a bigger switch to cover all of those. I painted each piece separately with a paint pen before putting it together, so it is a mix of colors, yellow and blue and red. Inside the automata, when you turn the switch, it sets of a series of gears where, on the bottom, moves a plate the will push down on the switch. These gears are all attached to the sides, and the whole thing is made of wood. I put all the pieces together with wood glue, and I also had to use tools like drills and sanders. Drills bore holes into the bottom plate to make the holes bigger, and sanders round the sides of various pieces.

Hello, and this is my fourth Tech blog post! Okay, so we watched this documentary film in class called something like Wonders of the Clockwork World. It was talking about the history of automata. The narrator talked about how a long time ago, people built whole cities filled with automata people going about doing their business. I thought it was really cool how big the model was and how realistically it worked. Another thing it showed was a swan machine that controlled the swan, the water, and some fish to make it move beautifully and gracefully. That was one of my favorites and I liked especially how the water looked realistic but if you looked closer, you could see it was solid and fake. It also told a story of a man from long ago that studied movements of real humans doing activities and human anatomy to try and make automata. He even got real skin to do the job! I would not want to look further into how he did that… But anyways I thought it was very interesting!

Hi guys, guess what! I finished my cam! So the way it works is that there is a box and on the side is a little wheel. You turn the wheel, and a pole turns inside with two things that push up the poles coming up out of the top. They rise and drop at opposite times. Unfortunately, there are a few flaws to the machine that I wasn’t able to fix. First of all, one of the poles has trouble going back down after it rises because it has a little bit of hardened glue on it that makes it sometimes stick loosely to the sides. Second of all, the box is a little bit crooked because after I was finished it got bonked around a little bit. But other than those small inconveniences, I am glad I finished once and for all!

In tech now, I am just finishing up building my cam, a simple machine that we are making from paper. When you turn a little wheel that goes in the side, a bar turns on the inside and pushes two little poles up out of the top. I have finished putting those in the top and the box has been folded and cut. Now I need to build the inside and put on the wheel so that my cam can work well. I hope that next time I post, I will have finished it!

So we are just starting our tech quarterly. We are learning a lot and also getting to start building simple machines. We are learning about things like forces and the parts of a piece of technology: the load, the fulcrum, and the effort. We are also starting to build things using tools like slice-cutters, to cut small lines, scissors, to cut bigger lines, and making little things called cams out of paper. Cams turn little wheels to make tubes rise and go down at the top.

This week we used a coding program called swift playgrounds to write code where we were able to be asked questions, answer them, and even have our answers repeated later on. One thing that was challenging about this was that we were writing the code directly and sometimes it was hard to remember the exact order that the text goes in, because it is complicated and makes a big difference. But once I got the hang of it, it was not difficult and became very easy to write this code. I did find it kind of fun because I was able to make what I wanted to happen happen on the code, and we had a little more freedom to do what we wanted.