Sdudekula27 Blog

This week we did more work with spreadsheets, and continued doing a Wellness Log. Below is a chart that shows last week’s wellness log (10/26).

It was a simple process filling out this chart, every time I did anything here I just wrote down an estimate of the amount of time I did that activity for. For this second week, I’m going to calculate averages and totals. The wellness log is a good way to practice using spreadsheets, which can be very useful for things like organizing data and recording progress. Overall, I think that spreadsheets is extremely useful, and after you get used to it, it can make things much easier.

For a while now, we’ve been stepping aside from tinker and other projects, and have been focusing on a coding game called Playgrounds. This week we downloaded a new playground called answers, were we learn about ways to ask and respond to questions. We did two different levels, Text and Types.  Text was learning how to code a question, and types was different ways to answer and make the question and answer more interesting. This made Types more interesting, but I wouldn’t have been able to do it without Text. Below is a picture of the level Types, along with the answers I typed and the code for how to put out choices to choose from for the answer.

The last swift playgrounds puzzle I was able to complete in Learn to Code 1 was one that I had to figure out for an assignment.  It was called Checking for Switches, and it was challenging because every time you did it the order of which switches were on and which were off changed, and our goal was to have every switch on. The directions were very helpful, because they were clear on how to use the “if” command to make sure we’d only toggle the right switches. Here is a picture of the first few puzzles I did, but there are more below.

I liked Anna Clara’s music video because it was simple and clean, and kinda like a real mini concert commercial thing because the background was an actual stage, and she had a drummer, someone playing the piano, and someone playing the guitar and singing. I think one thing she could add is a little more music, instead of just choosing one, but it’s overall very good.

After watching the video about how technology had helped all those people become successful and pursuing their dreams, I decided that I thought that Vida’s job was really cool because technology helps her a lot. Like she said the computer needs help so her job is to do that. She does the actual analyzing, and I thought that was cool how her and everyone else who works with her know how to do that, and I think it’s an interesting job. I like the system they use, how the computer delivers the information but she kinda does the real behind-the-scenes work. I think it’s an overall impressive job.

A few days ago I finished recording my Capstone TedTalk. It took a couple takes, but eventually we did it. My sister recorded it while I gave the presentation using my laptop to put the images on the TV. Capstone was  a super fun project, and one of the reasons I like it so much is because you get to research whatever you want, something you’re passionate about. You can also choose what kind of project you are doing, like a video or TedTalk. Finally, you also get to interview someone. Capstone was one of my favorite projects of the year. Click here to watch my video on medicine!

After a while, I have FINALLY completed my interview with Dr.Yahr. I now have much more information for my Capstone TedTalk about medicine. Dr.Yahr is a pathologist. A pathologist is someone who works more in the area of diagnosing the specific disease that the patient has. Since my topic is mainly about medicine, I was able to expand it and talk about diagnosing diseases, side effects of medicine, and other topics. The interview definitely helped a lot, and I am finally ready to record.

Recently we’ve been working on Capstone, a project where you choose a topic you are passionate about or interested in, then do a project on it. You can do a Video, Tedtalk, or Ignite and I am doing a TedTalk. My topic is medicine. My main inquiry question (the main focus for the project) is “ How has the development of medicines for common ailments changed over time?”. While choosing my main inquiry question, It was very helpful to think about what I am passionate about, and look back at the curriculum wheel organizer and decide which question was the best. It was hard to pick though, because I really wanted to study all of them. Not only was it hard to pick, it was challenging to come up with all the questions. We are also going to be doing an interview, and I’m interviewing Dr.Yahr. Everyone had to fill out an interview organizer, then interview the person and add to their project. Overall, the experience was good because I learned something new about myself as a learner. So far, Capstone has been a fun learning experience. 

We finally finished our first podcasts! It took a lot of hard work. First, we had to right our feature articles. Me and Sasha did our feature article about homework and how it affects student’s lives. We did a survey and asked questions for students in the school to answer. We asked questions about how homework is affecting their after school activities, and how much homework they feel they should get. We did two interviews, we interviewed our school’s principle, and a fourth grade teacher from our school.

After getting all the information we needed to put together our feature article, we started planning out where all the writing and graphs were going to go. We have two pages in our feature article. We have four columns of writing, two pictures, and a pie chart from one of the questions in our survey.

After finally completing and printing our feature article, we started to work on our podcasts. Honestly, I thought it was going to be way harder than it actually was. All we had to do was practice recording the podcast, then do it with the microphone. We had a box to use and put the microphone in, then plugged the microphone into our chrome books. Then we spoke into the microphone and recorded our feature articles, reading off the document where we typed our feature article. Then, after we had the recording, we added music in the beginning and at the end. Now our first podcasts are all done! It was a fun experience.