Category: 6th Grade

Review on the Scratch project

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In this project I worked on for over two weeks, I was able to become more comfortable with using blocks in Scratch and most importantly, became much better at controlling things. What I enjoyed the most was the fact that I made a game for other people to actually play. My experience with making these 3 projects: Maze, Pong, and Scrolling was pretty good! My first tries for all the three projects were pretty good, to be honest. Nevertheless, making the Scrolling game was more ardous than the other two projects.

In order to make my project special, I made a scoring system which allowed me and the other people who play my game to be able to keep track of how many points they have. At first, I was confused on how to do so, but because Mr. Rose showed it to my whole class step by step, I had a really fun time making the system. What I basically had to do was make a new block. That was why I was almost pro at making it at the end of the class:)

Overall, since everyone’s projects were very creative and well thought, I especially liked Sunny’s as her project had a nice music along with the fish going through lots of obstacles.

In conclusion, I really really liked this project and so did the other projects to! At first, I believed that Computer Tech will be too hard for me since I am not good at coding; however, because of Mr. Rose and the myriads of ways he tried to support us, I was able to grow a lot from this quarter. Again, thank you so much Mr. Rose for working hard to make our projects really fun and most importantly, make learning exhilarating for us! 🙂

~Spread Sheet 2~

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From looking at this chart that shows the students’ favorite months of the year, I  learned that 1/4 of the sixth graders at SMS like variety of months. Some love January while other love August. It also taught me the diversity of the students in our school as well as how we are same in some ways.

First of all, we can say for sure that most of us love the summer. On the graph above, it says that 25%of the people who took the survey loved July which proves that. Surprisingly, this was the exact opposite of my favorite since my favorite month is December. I really like December, not only because I can play outside in the snow with my friends and siblings, but I can also spend more time with my family. Since it is cold in the winter, we stay at home/inside and I can get closer with them. Because I don’t know which students from which houses voted, I’m still not sure on which students from which house has the same favorite as me. However, I hope that a lot of people in Cooper does.

The chart shows the opposite of my favorite, so I was a bit surprised and dejected at first but I think that summer is popular since people get to go out with their friends more frequently. On normal school days, a lot of students go to hangout in places such as goldenhorshoe and their elementary parks, but in the summer, they can do that whenever they want. Overall, looking at the graph and learning more about how spreadsheets work was a very intersting experience for me. I hope that I get to learn more about it in the upcoming future too.

 

Music Video

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This is my second blog of this quarter! Today, I will talk about the music video project! In this project, like we did before, we used the platform called Scratch and made a project that makes the the sprites (if you don’t know what a sprite in scratch is, click here because this website will explain what sprites are! Oh and ya… It’s a bit hard to explain here….:https://www.idtech.com/blog/what-are-scratch-sprites)move and dance! We also had to incorporate music đŸŽ¶ into our projects which was really fun to do! One of the biggest challenges I faced in the project was finding the right music. At first, to be honest, I didn’t even know where to get the loop musics from Scratch.(or as you want to call it, a bgm=background music) Luckily, I found it on myself towards the end of the class! YAY! I was really glad. Now, let’s talk about finding the right music. Well…. when it came to finding the right music, I had a bit of difficulty since there were too many of them to choose from! In the end though, I used these loops called “ Dance Magic”, “Xylo1”, and “Xylo2”, which sounded pretty good to me:) Honestly, I still have some things I want to figure out. First, I really would like to know how to turn the music down at the end of the project. When I was looking at Sam’s project, I saw that his  sprite stopped dancing after the music got quieter and quieter by each second or so, and I thought that doing that was a really good idea. Next, I would want to learn more about how to turn back the sprites from being upside down. I had to spend a long time trying to figure out, but because of the circumstances, I had to forget about it and submit my project:(…..

In the end,  something good happened. I was able to take a look at my classmates’ projects!!!!! From all the wonderful projects that were on there, I really really liked Sam’s! His music and backdrop matched perfectly and how the sprite moved made me laugh 😂! Probably the best thing was that he made the sound both bigger and quieter in the project! I hope I will be able to do that sometime though it may seem impossible…

Ummmmm….

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Ok, so here’s the thing…

I wasn’t able to finish my project today…

Well, not exactly “unfinished”…

I finished building mine, but Mr. Calvert told will have to fix a bit of it because it wasn’t working well…

So, I will post the pic of mine on Monday when I get it!

Until then, byeeeee!

Suprisingly….. tech is coming to an end :(

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Hello to people who are reading my blog! This week’s title is different than the usual blog posts’ titles, as you may have noticed from reading my previous ones. Well…. I did that on purpose. Let me tell you why.

THIS WEEK IS THE LAST WEEK OF TECHNOLOGY THIS QUARTER!!!!!!!
When I heard this, my mind was like “WHHHHATTT?”, though some other people may disagree and be like “YAYY! FREEDOM!”
I am very dejected because it was really thrilling and elating, learning and participating in this class. ( Though I also always looked forward to looking for my friends who took this class after me A BIT MORE THAN PARTICPATING?!…)

I think most of my classmates will agree with me, that this quarterly was one of the best quaterly (or ies? I know it has to be plural, but I’m unconfident…)this year.

This week, we did this project Mr. Calvert said none of his students have done beforeee! It was making a mechanical light switch that you put on your lightswitch!!! (Sounds a bit confusing, right? Sorry for not being able to explain it better!)
It has been so exiting coloring and everything so far this week, though it has been a bit annoying simultaneously because the oil marker’s paint has been getting on my fingers A LOT. Other than that, it is very fun.

Here are the things I’ve done so far…..

1. I colored the parts that Mr. Calvert cutted out ( I believe..) with 3 colors of oil markers (light blue, white, and silver).
2. Then, I waxed the gears with some crayons.
3.Next, I started to build all the parts together, which was fascinating, but hurting… I accidentally hit my finger with the hammer today… 🙁 🙁

Well… I guess these 3 steps are the only ones I have accomplished so far!

I will post the picture of the finished product on Friday, so until then, bye!

Technology: Blog post #8

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This is my blog post number 8 which means that the quaterly is gradually coming to the end….. 🙁

Honestly, I am a bit sad, mostly because I was able to conduct myriads of experiments.. I never got to do that in other quaterly(ies)*I don’t know if quaterlies is a word, so I’m just going to put it like that..

Well….. anyways, I will change the subject and start talking about what I’m supposed to write this week!

For this week’s blog post, I will write about the experiment we did in class yesterday!

In class, we did this experiment on Pararell circuits. At the beginning of the class, Mr. Calvert showed us how different types of circuits work, and taught us to be careful when doing the experiment. He told us to be especially careful and to even WEAR SAFETY GOGGLES!!!! At first, I didn’t take it that serious, but when he PURPOSEFULLY showed us the wrong way to put the cords in the breadboard, the LED light literally exploded like CRAZY!!! I got scared and frightened simultaneously and my eyes widened out of shock! I think everyone else did, as someone shouted ” WOOAAHHH!! What th-?????” (Oh and to be sure, the student only said until “th-” not till the word that I didn’t put it here, so I didn’t just finished the sentence on purpose…)

After that, the room got quiet for a moment and we started doing the experiment on our own. The teacher came around the room to check if we were doing it in the right way, and when he came to me, he said I was doing a pretty good job! Yayy!! I was very excited and relieved! Thought there was a loose cord that came out of the breadboard I was using, Mr. Calvert just put it in really quick and fixed it, so when I put the last LED light in at the end of the class, it worked really well.

I just REALLY hope my experiment goes well on Friday and nothing like what happened to Mr. Calvert’s will happen to mine……….
Oh! and I’m sure about one thing in my project:DEFINITELY wear your safety goggles because you never know what might happen!!!!

Technology: Post #7 Electricity and Circuits

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Today, I will talk about this week’s one of the two assignments that I had…

Earlier this week( On Monday, I think), my teacher, Mr. Calvert assigned us to make an electroscope!!!! When I heard about that, I was excited because I’d never really made one before in my whole entire life! My favorite part of it was probably the testing part because it was really fun to see the foil move whenever I got the balloon 🎈 closer to the paper clip. It was kind of like a butterfly 🩋 flapping its wings.

The whole point of that was to guess what we think was happening there, so I had to think for some time before the experiment. Honestly, it didn’t really come quickly to my mind, but when it finally did, it was like the best thing that could happen in the entire world just happened!!!! I remembered that what was happening in my experiment was called “Static electricity”! My mom had told me about that when I was young and when my sister was rubbing a ballon on her head.

I hope the next experiment (Making a circuit) that I have to do today will be exciting as usual!

Well、this is the end of my blog for this week. Until next week, bye!

Technology: Blog Post #5 Cams and Cranks

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Yesterday in tech, I learned about cams. In the beginning of the class, Mr. Calvert showed us an example of what our finished projects would look like. It was really cool to see that because it was so similar to the other version of it that we saw last week. We did a Nearpod in class, and in one of the slides, there was an animation of the cams moving. The animation was really realistic and was very colorful, so I enjoyed it a lot. It made me really want to make my cams soon! I hope it will turn out auspicious when I do.
Today in class, it was the day of student/teacher conferences, so while Mr. Calvert talked with the students about their progress in Tech this quarter so far, we watched a video about cams that were invented and made in the 18th and 19th centuries. One piece that was made in the late 1770s that really hooked me in was the little boy being able to write on paper. It has been existing for more than 200 years, and is one of the oldest automata in our world! The cams in him is really complicated, and what is more, you can change the combination of the words so the boy could write different things. There were more and more interesting inventions later in the video, but I liked this one the most! I hope I can take a look at this in person one day!

Technology Blog post #4

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This week in class, we learned about levers. Mainly, we learned about the three classes of levers. ( the first, the second, and the third)Because I am already learning about Simple Machines in Science, I was able to fully understand all of Mr. Calvert’s lessons. Yet, there were myriad facts that I didn’t know before this week’s classes. For instance, I was never able to determine which simple machines are a lever and a pulley. But since Mr. Calvert taught me in class how to do so, I am now mastered at it! I also didn’t know a lot about catapults and how they are used in our society today… ( But now I do😆)
I am looking forward to posting my finished project in Flipgrid later in Technology class! This week’s project was very exciting and exhilarating, so I can’t wait for the next project!

Technology: Blog post #3

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This week, in class, we are learning about trusses. In the Nearpod lesson yesterday, I learned that triangles are much more stronger than rectangles and such other shapes. Mr. Calvert then said that is why triangles are used for buildings like bridges more frequently than rectangles, rhombus, and parallelograms. Today, he proved that to us by building a  3D cube, and showing it to us what will happen if we put weight on them. He stacked books until the cube couldn’t support them anymore and broke. When watching his experiments, I was amazed because I had never really looked into what shapes were used when building skyscrapers and bridges. When people construct and design their structures, they need to think about how much the structures will be able to hold and how long it will hold simultaneously, so I thought that being a constructor is an really arduous job and requires critical thinking skills.