In the Technology classroom there are many posters with quotes on them. The quote I want to talk about is, “A man who is certain he is right is almost sure to be wrong,” said Michael Faraday. Personally, I think that this means don’t be overconfident in something because there’s a chance you may be wrong.
Plastic Movie
The other days we just finished a movie in Tech. It was mainly about plastic and how we need to reduce our use of it. As we watched the film there were some striking facts. One of them was that by 2050 it is predicted that there will be more plastic than fish in our oceans. This was shocking because people really need to open their eyes and reducing plastic use. As time passes this problem will only get worse.
Circuits
About a month ago we finished our third unit on circuits. Along with this unit there is a project. You could probably guess what it is, making a circuit. The materials used for this project was cardboard, tinfoil, popsicle, and tape. The goal was to light up a light bulb. To do this in your circuit two pieces of tin foil have to touch together. My circuit had one piece of tinfoil on cardboard as the base and another piece of tin foil attached to cardboard held by a rubber band. If you pushed down on the cardboard with tin foil it would touch the base of the circuit and the light, connected to the tin foil on the base, would light up.
Thailand Cave Incident
Recently in Technology we watched a movie about the boys who went into a cave with their soccer coach and got stuck inside for more than two weeks. This incident occurred in late June of 2018 and was talked about all over the world. To me the most shocking part about this is that all of the boys were alive and didn’t sustain severe injuries. Also the rescue took lots of time to figure out how to do it safely. This was the second movie we have watched in Tech and I thought that it was the most interesting.
Pendant Design and Soldering
Soldering was our first big project in Technology. The assignment was to make a pendant out of wire. The first part of this project was making a planning sheet (it’s attached below). Once you were done with the planning sheet you would make the circle part of the pendant. After that you started the design, my pendant was an eye. To make the design you would cut the wires you were given and shape them (the wire was bendable). This took around 2-3 classes for me. Once that was done the final step was actually soldering the piece together. Before you could solder you had to put your pendant and its design on double-sided tape, one side on paper the other with the pendant. If you did this then you were ready for soldering. To solder you have to heat up this type of metal and put it on the connecting points of wires on your design. Once you put the hot metal on the meeting points it would dry and hardened in less than ten seconds. This means that there wasn’t any room for error. All in all this project was pretty fun and I’m looking forward to the next one. At the bottom there is an image of my final piece. 
Technology Safety Rules
I have just started Technology. On the first day it was very clear to me that safety is the number one priority. There are 12 rules and we learned about all of them. I think that rule number one “slow down THINK before you act” is the most important rule. This is because every rule basically falls under this one rule. If you use your head and think then the chances of you not following the other 11 rules is low. Also we watched a video of this guy who got a power drill stuck and tangled in his hair. There was blood dripping down his face so that will definitely make me more careful when I use the tools and machines. An image of the 12 rules is attached below.
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.