Capstone 6

For my capstone presentation I decided to do a movie. The majority of my class did TED Talks. For the movie you had the option to do it on iMovie or WeVideo. I chose to do it on WeVideo because then I could work on the movie at home and at school. If I wanted to do iMovie I would have to choose to work on it at school or at home since it’s linked to desktops not accounts. This movie was actually my first time using WeVideo so I kind of had to teach my self how to use it. My movie is around 5 minutes long, and has many images. The first step that I did was find images for the first part of my script and put them in the movie. Then I did a voice over for that part. I repeated this step over and over for each part of my script. Once I was finished I added transitions to my movie between each image. My final step was having people watch my movie and give me feedback on how to improve it. At first I only presented my movie to a couple of people doing it one at a time, but then everyone presented there TED Talks or movies in front of the whole class. When it was my turn the class watched my movie and gave me some really helpful feedback. For example some of the images got cut off and I forgot to put my name on the one the introduction. My next post will be about CapCon 2019. That is the day that we all present our projects to the parents.

Capstone 5

This blog post will be about my main inquiry question. My main inquiry question is, how have sports stadiums designs changed over time. To research this question I used 2 two articles. One of them was about the evolution of stadiums, if you want to look at it click on this link, https://www.athleticbusiness.com/stadium-arena/stadium-design-evolution-from-1977-to-2017.html. This article was very helpful because it was all about the evolution of stadiums from 7 different views designs, seating, technology, and more. The other article was about the Hillsborough Disaster (a tragic event that occurred in a soccer stadium in which 96 people were crushed to death). You may be wondering why would I want to know about this. I wanted to know about this because after this event stadiums were made safer by adding more seats. When I answered this question I had to use graphic organizers. The two graphic organizers I used were boxes and bullets and a timeline. These are my two favorite graphic organizers in my opinion.

Capstone 4

For capstone one thing that you had to do was have an interview. At the interview you had to ask at least ten questions. The interview I did happened to be at my site visit. I wasn’t planning on interviewing someone at my site visit. I was originally planning on interviewing an engineer or an architect but I got no responses, so I did my interview at Yankee Stadium. My interview was with Daniel Webber, stadium operations at Yankee Stadium for non-baseball related events. He was also the person giving me the tour so as we went through the stadium I asked him questions. Since I wasn’t planning to do the interview with him I had to come up with my questions on the spot. One of my questions was what events are hosted at Yankee Stadium other than baseball. I was surprised when he said the trade shows, soccer, football, and corporate events because I only knew that baseball was played at Yankee Stadium. In all my interview was very helpful for my research.

Mixtures and Solutions

In class we have been working on mixtures and solutions. A mixture is something made by mixing two or more things together and they can be separated. A solution is a mixture of two or more things that is homogeneous.

The first day we did an experiment. We received DE (Diatomaceous Earth), table salt, gravel, and water. We had to make every possible combination with these substances, with one combination containing two substances. When we had each combination we had to see if we could separate the two substances using, paper filters, screens, and cups. We then recorded onto a chart what the results were. Two combinations could be separated and four combinations could be. This experiment was very fun to perform and I can’t wait to do more like these.

The next day that we did science we did another experiment. That experiment was mix one teaspoon of colored sugar with 25 ml of oil, 25 ml of water, and 25 ml of vinegar. The colored sugar was mixed individually with each of these ingredients. When sugar and water was mixed together the sugar dissolved and the water changed to the color of the sugar. When the oil and sugar mixed nothing happened. The oil’s color didn’t change and the sugar was still there. The last thing was vinegar and sugar. The sugar dissolved in the vinegar and the vinegar’s color became a brighter shade of the color of the sugar. Before we conducted each experiment we wrote hypothesis and after each experiment we wrote our observations. Mixtures and solutions is probably my favorite science unit and I cam’t wait to do more work in this unit.

Capstone 3

This post will be about my site visit at Yankee Stadium. One thing that I want to say before I tell you about my tour is that my topic is sports stadiums not as specific as football stadiums. For your capstone project you had to have a site visit. A site visit is when you go somewhere that has a relation to your project. I did my site visit with a classmate of mine because he was doing baseball and he was doing stadiums. His cousin happened to work at the stadium so he gave us the tour. The inside of Yankee Stadium was gigantic. I had been to many stadiums but when a stadium is empty it seems ten times bigger. We went all around the stadium at looked at the best and worst seats. My favorite part of the tour was when I got to go on the track of the field, the clay part of it and we went into the dugout. The last thing that we did was go into the retired jersey area in the stadium. In the museum we could see all of the retired numbers of Yankee players. I also did my site visit at the interview. In the next post I will get into more detail about it. The site visit was really helpful for my research and I can’t wait to present soon.

Here is a photo from my site visit.

Capstone 2

Recently we started capstone. In the other blog post I said that I chose Google as my topic. It was too hard to research it so I decided that I was going to do NFL stadiums.

This post will be about my inquiry questions. To start ideas for a main inquiry question we did some pre-search. That really helped me with coming up with questions.. My main inquiry question is, “How have football stadiums designs changed over time?” I chose this because many aspects of football stadiums fall under this like technology in them, rules, and the process of building them. I learned that many football stadiums have some technology that no other places in the world have. We also worked on our sub questions.

The sub questions are supposed to act as follow up questions to our main inquiry question. One of my sub questions is, ” Who funds NFL stadiums?” I probably would not have thought of that question if I didn’t do any pre-search. In all we’re supposed to have one main question and five sub question. Next week we will start our research.

Capstone 1

My class has just started the biggest project of fifth grade, capstone. Capstone is a project where you choose any topic and you research it using one main question and five other questions. A part of the project is that you have to get a site visit and an interview related to the topic. You then present to a group of people.

Before we chose a topic we were given a packet that had questions about our interests, areas of expertise we have, things we enjoy, and more. This was supposed to help us brainstorm ideas for our topics.

The process of choosing a topic was hard because there were so many options. At first I was thinking of doing something sports related about football or basketball. I was seriously considering doing the football hall of fame but then I thought about how hard it would be to get a site visit for that because it’s all the way in Canton, Ohio. Then I decided I would do something related to technology or a certain brand. I narrowed my topics down to three ideas, Apple, Google, and Nike. In the end Google was the winner because it interested me the most.

I hope that when I start researching I will have enough information to find about Google. Also I hope that my interview is a helpful one. A goal that I have for capstone is to use many different resources because I usually use only a few.

Newton Infographic

Earlier this year my class made an info graphic about Isaac Newton and the three laws of motion. I never got to post about it so I decided I will now. The first step was that Mr. Casal shared an info graphic template with us in our Drive. In the template there were different layouts for the info graphic and different icons that we could use. The icons could be any color. We then researched about Isaac Newton and the three laws of motion. For the three laws of motion we had to give our own definitions. That was the hardest part of the project because some of the laws didn’t make much sense. Another part of the info graphic that was challenging was to find a way to incorporate the writing with the illustrations. At the time of this project we were working on our rocketry unit so we had to write how rocketry connected to the three laws of motion. All in all I enjoyed making this project and I look forward to projects that are similar to this one.

Rube Goldberg 6

This is the final post of the six. As the Rube Goldberg project is coming to an end I will review the whole entire process of this project. The first thing we had to do was figure out if we wanted to work alone, in a partnership, or a group. I chose to work with a partner. The reason to why I chose him as a partner was because we both had very similar schedules. The next step was to make a detailed and labeled sketch of what our machine would look like once it was built. If you read some of my past posts you would know that our final step was to pop a balloon. When the due date for the sketch came we had a museum that had everyone’s sketch in it. We would walk around and look at the sketches then leave a comment. Two days after the sketches were due the first three of our six blog posts were due also. The next step was to build the actual machine and test it out. My partner and I only had to meet up once to build and test. Many other groups met multiple times with each other to build so we were lucky that we got it to work the first day. Even though we only did in a day we had to work for 5 hours and it took over 30 attempts. We finished the machine two weeks from the due date March 6. From then on we worked on the final three blog post. The final three posts due date is March 7. Overall this project has been so fun. I enjoyed this better than the water filter and rocketry unit. My favorite part of this project was probably when I heard the balloon pop after 5 hours of hard work.

These are some ads I made for my project on Adobe Spark.

 

Rube Goldberg 5

During the break my partner (Andre) and I built our machine. The experience was very fun, but there were a lot of times that frustrated us. The thing that was the most annoying was when we reached our final step and the thumbtack taped to the meat cleaver would fall and bounce right off of the balloon without even puncturing it. Something else that was annoying was when the whole course was set up and we started but the marble wasn’t on the track. In all the machine took five hours to build. It also took around 30 attempts until it finally popped the balloon. Once we ran through the course many times we decided that some changes would have to be made. One change that we made was that we used a meat cleaver instead of a hammer. We made this change because the hammer was to heavy to stand up on their own because the weight was uneven. If I had to chose the fun but the most challenging part of this project it would definitely be this part. The best part of all was when I heard the pop of the balloon.

This is a movie my partner and I made about the project.