Capstone One

Hello dear readers! The time has come to begin capstone. Capstone is the most important project in my entire time at the Scarsdale Schools. In capstone, we will choose a topic to study and basically study till we can’t do it any more. At then end we will have answered our main inquiry question. I  feel pretty hyped about capstone because I  will finally be able to study stuff I  actually like and still get credit for it. The problem is there was so much to choose from, which brings us to the next section.

Had to think long and hard about this question and it did not come to me easily. Kind of like a smack in the face when you know you deserve it. But anyway, we had to think about what interested us and we filled out this long long organizer (for some reason all big projects have a long long organizer in the beginning.)about what interested us and what was something we knew a lot about. But in the end I  chose to study unionization.

When I  was coming up with my inquiry question the main challenge I  faced was opinions. For one reason or another, all my questions had an opinion in there. But that got solved when I  took a gander at the four levels of questions. I  then refined my topic so that I  got to say what I  wanted to say. So I  decided to ask under what circumstances do unions form and are there strategies effective in obtaining what they want? I  chose this because it is open and leaves a lot of room for my fabulous sub questions.

For sub questions I  basically broke down the main question into six other miny questions such as what laws has the government created concerning unions? And what strategies do big businesses use to bust unions? I  chose these questions because when I  answer them I  can sort of group that knowledge back together and answer my main inquiry question. A challenge I  faced was wording. You could word something weirdly and then you fail Capstone. Which in my opinion is the ultimate humiliation. So any way I  am pretty happy with my sub questions because they came a lot easier than my main inquiry question.

So in conclusion I  am pretty excited to do capstone and I have very high hopes about the fruits of this project. But as they say, “Famous last words!”

Rube Goldberg one

We in the online 5th grade class have come to the Rube Goldberg projects. I, personally, am not a big fan of Rube Goldberg but I think that I will enjoy this project. The objective is to pour milk in my cereal.

I have written down all of the materials I need but have yet to collect them. I will need some marbles. I will also require dominoes as well as pulleys. I will also need a small lever that I will role warble off of. I will then need to somehow get some milk and cereal. Then finally, I require a right angle inclined plane with a slant to it. this could fail in an immeasurable amount of  times. but to understand why this ten step mechanism could fail you must observe the process yourself.

It will start with me releasing the sling so the marble can roll down a ramp into a long row of dominoes.the the dominoes will knock a second marble in to a balanced pulley there by lifting the back end so it lifts part of the lever which releases a car into a marble which then falls into a second balanced pulley which knocks the milk into the inclined planes so the milk slowly pours into the bowl of cereal. as you can see, that seems like a waste of time. but isn’t that what Rube Goldbergs are for?

I really hope that this machine does not result in the destruction of my whole house. But instead, In sort of a useful machine.