Most Meaningful Project

I have had many projects throughout this year, but the one that was the most meaningful to me was the last project of the year, ‘Change Agents for Earth’. This project meant the most to me because of how much we learned about future side effects from climate change and how serious they were. They were scary issues like deadly diseases, floods, dehydration, and starvation. All things that would cut the Earth’s population in half. I have learned, because of this project, to respect the environment more than I used to because if I didn’t, those disasters would come true.

 

The driving question for this project was “How can we design and evaluate a solution for the over consumption of one of Earth’s natural resources.” To start this project, we watched a video called ‘Earth 2100’. The main character was a women who survived the time frame of 2009-2100 and how she lived through the disasters that would come if we continued to litter, if we continued to pollute the air, and if we continue to care less about the environment.

 

After lots of research, the whole class grouped up with other people and we brainstormed how we could create a solution to air pollution and the over consumption of fossil fuels. We looked back at the time where our teacher, Mrs. Opp, talked about the Hethrow Airport in London and how hundreds of planes come and leave that place everyday, being a huge part of air polltuion. In the end, my group decided to make a solar powered plane.

 

After weeks and weeks of prototyping, we finally finished the final model/prototype and it didn’t fly, but it moved, so we did accomplish something. Due to this project, I have learned that the little things can make a big difference that could effect my life in the future drastically. I have also learned not to go crazy with my ideas for my projects, or else I would end up with something that doesn’t work. I hope that you could recognize this problem too and conserve the air.

Bio-Dome Experiment

At least a month ago, a group that I chose and I started a experiment. The objective was to make a bio-dome home for any critters that we chose. We were also required to have plants that the teacher gave us that would be able to grow inside of the dome, the plants’s name was an Italian Arugula. We made the bio-dome out of two soda bottles. We added dirt and seeds to grow the plants and snails, the critters that we were going to put in the bio-dome.

Today, we took a look at the bio-dome. The snails are still alive and roaming around the small space they have. The plants are shorter than other groups in my class but they are as healthy as a track runner. They are just really short. In the beginning of the experiment, we wanted to make a little pond at the corner of the bio dome. But today, there is no pond at all, I think it was because the rock bed wasn’t packed enough to play as a dam that separated the dirt from the water. We also placed an apple for worms that we were going to, but didn’t, put in the bio dome, in the bio-dome. The apple slowly got rotten and is now almost at the finish line for decomposing. Because of the decomposing apple, flies somehow entered the bio-dome and is now buzzing around it.

All in all, I would say that we succeeded in our bio-dome, if it wasn’t for that apple, but the plants survived, the snails survived, and everything is alright.

Bio dome

Parkour Palace, The Happiest Place on Earth.

For these past few weeks, I have been working on a PBL project for math. For this project, we were grouped up by our teacher to design our very own playground.  In our group we decided to have a theme, a indoor parkour playground with splash art on the walls. The name of our playground was “Parkour Palace, the craziest place on earth.” Our playground consisted of a slide, many foam pits you could jump into with our trampolines, two sets of obstacle courses so that you could race with a friend, benches, and many more things.

To help keep everybody in our group on task, everyone had a job in every group. My job was called the “3D specialist”, who creates a 3D print of what our playground would look like. To make the 3D print, we attached 3D shapes, made out of paper, and glued it onto  paper. The most difficult shape for me to make was a tiny, short triangular prism. Whenever I tried taping it or gluing it, it would always fall apart or just get squished.

I finally finished the 3-D print and all the shapes were fine. But I still had to finish practicing my part for when I present. It was the day that our group had to present, so I had to practice in my mind while I was listening to other groups present.

We went up and presented and the only thing that I forgot to say was that our theme was parkour, but it was pretty obvious so it was okay. I don’t think we did too bad in our presentation, so I’m not too worried about what grade we were going to get. This project was different to all our other math projects, actually I think it our first PBL math project, but it was really fun and I hope I could do it another time.

Design Day #2

So apparently, we had a second design day and this time it was about CA, Milpitas’ landfill and how the smell was invading everyday, city life. My group, Cherry, Cleo, Wendy, and, obviously, me, grouped up and started to brainstorm ideas on what we would make for that day. We came up with billions of ideas like, big candles, trapping the air inside of the landfill, and exploding the trash while flinging it in the air. I know, the last idea sounded like a crazy and weird idea, but it was design day, we had to use our creativity to think of something all the way around the world away from the box.

 

So we decided to do the exploding the trash idea, except we modified it a bit. Our idea was then catapulting a capsule of trash into space and exploding it. Just incase everything didn’t explode, we launched it towards the sun to burn the remaining trash.

 

Something really challenging was building the catapult. It was challenging because we were using a spoon for the catapult, but we didn’t know how to make it stable so it would have more power. So instead of gluing it stable, we added an extra layer of plastic, bent the plastic, and glued it, so now we could catapult it. So now, we can fling the trash.

While we were building the catapult, we couldn’t help but play with it a bit. So we cut up foam and launched them.

 

All the class’s groups were about to present. There were many creative but original ideas, like robots, my favorite was the bicycle prototype, I forgot the name, but it was a bicycle that released fresh smelling air. So when we voted for those that we liked to send to the Evergreen District Science fair, I chose theirs. In the end, one of the robot teams won and got an invitation to the science fair. I didn’t really feel sad about not going, so oh well.

 

The day was a fun day because I got to spend time with my friends and build weird idea’s. 

Open Campus Day

Open Campus Day happens once every school year. This year, I was a school ambassador, a student that leads visitors around our school campus.

Open Campus Day is probably the most important day for a school ambassador. They would spend the whole day touring visitors, which was relieving for me. Open Campus day was the same day that our grade level had our 2nd exhibition for our project we have been working on for 10 weeks or so. The project was called The Magic of Coding.

The morning of Open Campus Day, I went straight to the library, where everything was set up for the visitors. When I got there, the first thing I noticed was the delicious FOOD! I was very tempted, there were muffins, cheese, fruits, coffee, and orange juice. Sadly, we weren’t aloud to eat them until there were left-overs or if we already took a tour.

The first tour was with my group. The person we toured was a very friendly person that used to work in the same district, so she pretty much knew everyone that worked in the school. The next visitor was a bit difficult to tour because we kept losing him, he still was a very nice guy. We toured him to every class which took a while because at one point half the tours were in one room. When I was done with that tour I was able to eat a muffin and drink some orange juice. THE MUFFIN WAS SO GOOD. Bummer I only could’ve had 1 muffin.

My last tour was with some other group of ambassador’s unfinished tour, so it was pretty short. They only wanted to see the upper grade classes. So we took them to fourth grade which took forever, but I was okay with that because they were talking about the class relative things. The rest of the tour went smoothly.

Open Campus day wasn’t as fun as last year’s, but it was still a fun experience.

Best Of 2015!!!

5) My Birthday 

My fifth favorite of 2015 was my birthday. I remember that I invited my older brother and friends to meet up at the theaters to watch ‘Transylvania 2″. Something unexpected happened, when I got there I saw one of my best of the best friends that moved away running up to me. I was super happy to see her, we all spent that morning having fun. At night, I also went to my cousins house, my cousin ran down stairs and told his mom that their was going to be a lunar eclipse happening soon. After a while, we walked to a park that was pretty close, but also had tall hills so we could stand and watch. After a while without a eclipse, we walked back home to cut my birthday cake and to get chairs to go back to the park. We cut the cake and went outside… the lunar eclipse was already half-way done, so we kinda missed it, but that’s okay. It was fun in the beginning.

4) My Older Brothers Birthday

My brother’s birthday was a fun experience. He told me a week before that my sibling and I were going bowling with my older cousins. It was my first time bowling so I was excited. When we got there we put on our bowling shoes and went to a alley. We ordered food which was delicious, I ordered garlic potato wedges which I finished and enjoyed. For some reason, my youngest brother had the most points out of my brother, my sister and me, which was oddly frustrating. Anyway, my brother had a good time.

3) Winter Break (2015)

Over my winter break, my cousins slept over. My family loves to bake, so we baked for a whole entire day, but because of baking we had to skip ice skating which was one of the things that I looked forward to before Christmas Break. We made delicious desserts like apple pie, peppermint bark, and strawberry tarts. I also went to my cousins house and played a game most of the time. It was a fun break but I think 2014’s Winter break was better.

2) Family Camping 

I previously wrote about this in one of my other blogs so I’m going to be short about this. During the summer of 2015, obviously, I went to Collins Lake to go camping. My family and relatives love to swim so we had to go to a place that has a place to swim. There was a shop that sold lots of convenient camping things, but my favorite thing about the shop was the delicious ice cream. We were deciding to go swimming, we didn’t know that there was a specific spot at Collins Lake to go swimming, so we went to the closest part of the lake to our camp site. It was fun until I touched the floor… It was murky, dirty, goopy, mud. It was still pretty fun, even with the mud, we had mud battles and people kept slipping which was hilarious. We also set up a tent and called it the “Party Tent”. We called it that because it was where we played all the board games together while listening to music. Camping was… interesting.

1) Science Camp

SCIENCE CAMP WAS THE FUNNIEST, ENJOYABLE EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE! First of all, I got a cabin with my closest friends which made me happy because… they are my friends. Second of all, THE FOOD! No words to explain the food except this face… (:o. Third of all, well it’s kinda of private but lets just say that it was hilarious. One of my favorite memories was the rope course, it was my first time being on a one. There was a rope bridge, a log, and a tight rope. I was nervous but I thought of it as a one in a camp time thing and I probably wouldn’t do it again anytime soon so I was excited for it too. When I got on, my friends got scared because they were going on after me. I told them not to worry because the ropes wouldn’t break but they didn’t listen to a word I said, they just kept on being nervous. When we all reached the log, we had a choice to swing back and forth or just walk across to the other side. I was excited to swing and tried to encourage my friends to swing too. When it was time to swing I counted to 3 and swung. I ended up being the only one to swing but that’s okay, I still had wonderful time at camp.

Design Day

Design day was the one day where we would get away from math, reading, language arts, you know the usual school stuff and start to think out of the box and make work creatively.

As the name says, we would design all day, our most recent design day was the Friday before Thanksgiving. Since it was so close to Thanksgiving, we read a book called Turkey Trouble, which would be our topic for that design day. The book was about a turkey that was being hunted by a farmer that was expecting a turkey for his family dinner. Unfortunately, the farmer didn’t get a turkey for his family’s dinner because the turkey was clever enough to use disguises. In the end, the family had pizza as a replacement for the turkey.

Our class’s “mission” was to think of and create a plan for the turkey to last another Thanksgiving, but just a prototype. When I picked my group, we brainstormed what ideas we wanted to create. After a long time voting and deciding which idea we would use as our plan, we decided on the turkey dispenser. It was environmentally safe and clever, it would confuse the farmer and its made of vegetables, so if his family does eat one of the “turkeys”, then he would have a healthy Thanksgiving dinner.

Once we designed how to make it, we started to gather the materials we needed. The things we gathered was a cardboard box, a firm cardboard tube, cups, a piece of cardboard, beans, and a plastic stick.

When the whole grade finished there creation, we all went out to the quad, where everyone presented. It was hard for us to present because it was outside and everybody’s voice sounded quieter, but it wasn’t a problem for us.

When everyone was done presenting, we went into our classes to vote for BEST TEAMWORK, MOST INNOVATIVE, and MOST CREATIVE separately, and voted BEST OVERALL as a whole grade. My group ended up winning BEST TEAMWORK. This design day was a fun experience and I hope we can do it again over the school year.

Essay Reflection

If you didn’t know, I’ve been working on a essay about my project (about global warming) for about 6 weeks. It was a 5 paragraph essay that took a lot of time and thinking. Something difficultly challenging was finding the information I needed to write the essay. It was really hard to find, I had to surf the web in a short amount of time to find a very describing sentence. But, it all worked out.

I was really proud about how my essay turned out, but I was mostly proud of how many mistakes I made and had to fix. In the beginning, my paragraph had a lot of mistakes that I had to fix, so i fixed them over my 3 drafts. There were so many sentence that wasn’t clear about the information I was trying to say. So, I am proud of all the mistakes that I made because all the mistakes led up to the essay that I am proud of. Next time, I am hoping to improve on my research, I sorta struggled with it so I didn’t get the best information. Next time, I will take my time to find the best of the best information. I mean, I will be having to do this for the rest of my school years.

Favorite Memory

I have a lot of fun memories, but this was one of THE favorites.

        It was during summer and we were camping at a lake, I think it was called Collin’s Lake. So we were camping in Collin’s Lake, and we were driving into the entrance and then I saw a office. That office was the office that we had to check into, like a hotel. There was also a shop that was there with the office so we explored it. It had lots of snack, drinks, and lots of supplies for camping, but what caught my eye was the big ice cream station that had a billion different flavors. It also had a lot of picture showing that they were obviously professional. I could hold back how much I wanted just one scoop of ice cream. So I ran to my mom and asked her if I could have some. She let me, but it took a while because she told all of my other relatives to check it. All of a sudden all of my cousins were in line and we ordered our ice cream. Mine was cookie dough it tasted so good that I knew that it was going to be my favorite part of camp. I also knew that we were going to visit it on every other week of camping , and we did. After swimming in the lake, eating breakfast, and lots of other random time, we got ice cream. I remember when we hiked at least 2 miles to get ice cream, well at least that was my reason, my aunts reason was to get ice for our food and drinks. As we were hiking, we also saw a deer. Most of our camping trip we played cards and bored games, but it was really fun. My cousin put on music all day so even if we didn’t do anything, it was still entertaining.

It was a really fun trip so I hope I go camping again! (It was just my first camping trip.)

4 Things About Me!

Things about me…

1) Outdoor

I love to be outdoors because there’s so many different activities. Some activities that I enjoy outdoors is swimming, hiking/camping, fishing, sailing, playing sports, and travelling. There are also lots of fun places like the beach, the sea, the carnival/ amusement part, and arcades.

2) Personality

I would describe myself as goofy, talkative, and creative. Being creative is one the reasons why my favorite subject is art or literature. I also use my goofiness for cheering someone up, or just making someone laugh, but the reason I would call myself talkative is because I have many thoughts in my head that I have to share it. Even if you ask my family they might say I’m talkative, too.

3) Favorite Sports

I do enjoy some sports, too . Some sports like swimming, badminton, and volleyball. I don’t play badminton and volleyball often, but I swim at my cousins house all the time. The reason I like it so much is my sister joined the volleyball team in middle and high school. She also joined badminton in high school. She said it was really fun, so I want to join ,too

4) What I Do When I’m Bored

There are lots of thing that I do when I’m bored. Sometimes I like to call my friends, watch T.V., play my iPad/computer,or listen to music, things like technology. Other things that I like to do when I’m bored is read a book, eat/ get a snack , ask my mom/sister if she wants to go somewhere, or write something. Sometimes I do write stories, but only when I’m inspired.

There you have it, 4 things about me!