ECO ProjectIn Humanities, will study the history of the environmental movement, research and follow current environmental issues on an international scale, and interview young environmental activists. Students will create an e-magazine profiling one of these changemakers and explaining the science behind their campaigns. Essential Questions: What are some properties of materials that make them useful, and what properties make them difficult or dangerous as waste products? What are key environmental concerns internationally, especially related to materials science and chemistry? How are young environmental activists pushing our thinking, scientifically, to benefit the environment? This was a really cool project. Under the broad topic of enviromentalism, the project was to research and write a magazine article about a more specific topic. I studied how climate change impacts vector borne diseases, diseases spread by ticks, fleas, mosquitoes, and rats. I wrote about the problem, the solution, and the people involved, setting up and conducting two interviews and a tour of the San Diego Vector Control Program. I was able to create an article I was very proud of, with a page layout I'm also very proud of. Additionally, in this project, I had the leadership position of a section leader, so I was in charge of the Health section of the magazine. I also worked really closely with the Editors in Chief, and was probably as close as I could get to being one without having the title. I was able to expand on my writing skills, my leadership skills, and my technology skills through this project and i learned a lot. Future ExplorationsThis was the future explorations project, where we explored the future and took advantage of some opportunities. We reached out to different companies and places of work and did job shadow opportunities with them and created Shepard Fairey- style posters about us and the work that we might want to explore doing in the future. I did two job shadows, one at the San Diego Turtle and Tortoise Society, a non-profit rescue center in San Diego that takes in abandoned turtles and tortoises. I got to work hands on with people interested in herpetology and it was an amazing opportunity. I also job shadowed at an art studio and got to learn from an art teacher and work hands on with a cool art medium called cyanotype. Overall, the job shadowing was a really cool experience. My one regret is that I wasn't more active in looking for my job shadows, and if I was, I might have gotten some even cooler opportunities. The other half of this project, the poster, was also very cool and I was able to expand on my technology skills quite a lot, learning some cool effects in Illustrator and Photoshop.
0 Comments
The Brick ProjectDuring the ending stages of our ECO Project Digital Magazine, we were introduced to Carlos, a friend of our chemistry teacher Amilio’s who is living in Guatemala. Together, Carlos and Amilio had spent time creating innovative solutions to pollution problems, and as a part of this semester, we helped him make sturdy, concrete-like bricks out of plastic and sand, two readily available materials in Guatemala. Since recycling isn’t a priority in Guatemala, plastic tends to pile up, so this project was a way to solve the pollution problem as well as a way to build homes and residential areas. We tested a variety of different ratios of plastic and sand, from 1:2 to 1:9. At the end of the three weeks of trial and error we had 42 testable samples and 60 overall. After testing, we found a ratio which had a stress-strain equivalent to concrete. Originally the brick making process used a modified bread machine, yes a bread machine, to melt the plastic and sand into a hard-to-work-with mixture. After realizing that bread machines aren’t capable of melting plastic and sand, we used a handmade propane oven which involved melting the plastic with a blowtorch. During our last project, we learned how to recycle and reuse materials like wood, plastic, and metal. We applied the skills and techniques we learned from that project to make our bricks out of PETE and HDPE plastic and sand. In the end, this project took dedication and patience which is regularly seen in professional environments. The work done on this project is engineering in the real world. Our results and data will be used by actual engineers, who can expand on our results and use the work we did to positively impact the world. During the brick project, I took on a lot of different jobs. I started off by doing soldering work on the bread machines we were using to melt the plastic and sand together. We were rewiring the bread machines to be able to hit temperatures of 200 degrees celsius, hot enough to melt plastic. I learned a lot of electrical engineering and circuit work through doing this. After all the bread machines were soldered, I moved on to repairing the bread machines as they broke, which was often. Plastic and dough are not the same material and the bread machines aren't capable of mixing a large ball of plastic without breaking. We all soon realized that using the bread machines was no longer viable, so I started to help in a group that was making a second propane oven, pictured on the far right. One was already being made, so we were just following behind that group and doing what they had done. However, once again we decided it wasn't a viable option to keep building it because there was just no way it could be done in time. Instead, I helped build a wooden box that would make handling the already existing propane oven much easier. After completing that task, I worked on measuring, sanding, and grinding the bricks down to the 2:1 height to diameter ratio we needed to make them testable. After we crushed the bricks with a hydraulic press, I also worked and helped analyze the data we gathered. Overall, I was constantly doing something new and working with someone new during this project. I worked really hard to make sure it was turning out the way I wanted it to, because this was one of the first projects I've done at High Tech High where I felt like it meant something and I was actually doing good in the world, helping the pollution crisis in Guatemala and building homes. I learned a lot of hands on working and building skills like using solder, drills, and saws, and I also got to know a lot of really cool people in my class a lot better. ECO ProjectIn Chemistry, students will learn and practice experiments to break down and reconstitute materials, testing the strength of materials, and determining how their molecular structure gives rise to their macroscopic properties. They will use their new understanding to make products from materials they recycle themselves. Essential Questions: What are some properties of materials that make them useful, and what properties make them difficult or dangerous as waste products? What are key environmental concerns internationally, especially related to materials science and chemistry? How are young environmental activists pushing our thinking, scientifically, to benefit the environment? For this project, my partner and I built a wooden soap dish. The goal was to reduce plastic waste in bathrooms, and by encouraging people to make the switch to bar soap, our soap dish did just that. I learned a lot of building and woodworking skills through this project, like using waterproof stain, gorilla glue, and the laser cutter. I also was able to expand on my AI skills by doing design work on our laser cutter template, increase my time management skills as we raced against time to have a finished product, and I learned about the engineering and marketing process, taking something from an idea, to a design, to a prototype, to a finished product, which we sold out of within the first hour of the earth fair!
ShapeshiftersThe Shape Shifters math project was a culmination of all the work we've done in math all semester, including similarity, 3D geometry, and right triangle trigonometry. We showcased our work at exhibition, showing off our fractals, which taught us similarity, our shadow art, which taught us right triangle trig, and several other components. Our Dear Math letters, where we addressed math as though it was a person, saying things like "I love you", "I hate you", "you're dead to me", "I never want to see you again", were showcased on a wall full of ours and 132 others' letters. I personally worked on this wall and I created the poster for our exhibition, which is displayed above. This was my own unique fractal, called the 3-Point Compass. We created these to learn about similarity and fractals, a new unit of mathematics that is now being used to model things that have been too complicated to model before, like melting ice caps and coastlines. Fractals are self-similar, meaning that each iteration of the fractal is similar to the iteration before it, expanding following the same rules forever. However, my fractal was a little strange, which is why I have a 12 step rule, and that rule doesn't apply to the next iteration. In my design, rules for the fractal generation only applied sometimes, and then went out of affect. In fact, after the fourth iteration, the fractal just stops growing, and reflects horizontally across itself. Shadow art is where you use assorted objects to create art by shining a light source through them to create a new shape through the shadows. This project we did to teach us right triangle trig. The idea was that the light source, the angle of the back and the floor of the box, and the top of the shadow created a right triangle, and through trig, you could calculate the angle of elevation of your shadow art. Using the angle of elevation, you could mathematically calculate how to use the objects to create the perfect shadow. My shadow art, which I made with my partner Alani, was called Child's Play. The objects look like they were randomly strewn across a child's bedroom, but when light is shone through them, they make a superhero vigilante defending a city from an evil monster. This is the summary of learning I did for my right triangle trig and similarity portfolio. I included all the assignments and this we learned in the unit, from radians to soh cah toa to parallel projection in one artsy package. I chose to display this work piece because it's all the work I did this semester, and I'm proud of it all. I learned a lot about trig this semester, only having been briefly exposed to it for my ACT prep work, and it's a really cool and intriguing unit of mathematics that I'm excited to do more with next year. This year in math I've grown a lot academically. I pushed myself to do more and harder work, to collaborate with people in my class who I knew were also excited to take their learning to the next level. I learned about similarity and trigonometry and I was also able to expand on that learning outside of school. I collaborated with other people to help them make their math learning the best that it could be. In the projects we did last semester, with the plinko board and this semester with the shadow art, my partner and I were able to pool our creativity and mathematics skills to create a project we were both proud of. I am proud of the math I learned and the projects I did in math this semester and I feel prepared to start junior year math.
Essential Questions: 1. How does language shape us all as individuals, as communities, and as a nation? 2. How might we learn more about social organization and social stereotyping related to language, both now and in the past? Through investigations of language in the context of power, identity and political/social history, our team will explore the historical context of dominant and less-dominant languages, as well as the current context of globalization. Students will analyze and perform speeches, songs, and poems in English and Spanish, then work to develop a verbatim theatrical collage of interview clips with bilingual and multilingual San Diegans. The semester will culminate in a public performance with information and a talk-back session to discuss the collaborative creative process and the interwoven complexity of identity, language, and power. This project is steeped in developing cultural competency, researching historical context and current events that have led to our current web of mixed messages about multilingualism. Phase 1- Examining the cultural and lingual diversity within our own lives, and within our own families.For this phase of our project, we created info graphs on the benefits of bilingualism and we created a reader's theatre-type performance using the transcriptions of the interviews we conducted with family members on our own family's language background. We picked the highlights out of our interviews and with our team members and their interviews as well, we created a short script that revolved around language and power. Phase 2- Celebrating Mexican culture by creating a Día de los Muertos ofrenda.For the second phase of the project, we grouped up to replicate an important piece of the Día de los Muertos ofrenda, or altar. We wanted to celebrate Day of the Dead and connect with the culture of Mexico. To do this, we recreated an important part of the altar, such as the cempasuchil, food, papel picado, or the La Catrina and each making a poster celebrating an important member of our family that had passed recently. After creating a certain piece of the ofrenda and assembling it to look beautiful, we taught a class of fifth graders what we had learned. We passed on the information we learned to them so that they could create an ofrenda for their own classroom. We also took a field trip to Barrio Logan to see some authentic ofrendas made by members of the community. We released monarch butterflies, which is a staple of our ofrenda and an important symbol to Día de los Muertos to symbolize the people we've lost recently. Phase 3- Using theatre to express our community's connection to language and language's connection to power.For the final phase of the project, we explored the medium of verbatim theatre to express strong emotions, feelings, and messages. The class broke off into groups based off of personal interest. The play we created focused on the topic of language and power and how those topics related to each other and to our lives. We interviewed bilingual people of all walks of life and across many careers for this verbatim play and used their exact words. We had groups of actors, light and sound designers, editors, and much more. As a member of the acting group, we put on two performances of our play in the White Box Theatre. We worked really hard to do justice what our interviewees said and the wonderful script our editing team put together. We spent lots of time rehearsing and prepping for our two final performances. Math Class- Exploring quadratics and probabilityIn math class, we were working on the units of quadratic functions and probability. For our exhibition project, we created a plinko board and calculated the probability of getting into each of the baskets. We all worked in pairs. My partner and I created a plinko board centered around the Chinese Zodiac. We used data about the birthrates of different months to calculate which signs should be the easiest to score and which ones should be harder. Most people did their board as a triangle, but since we had so many zodiac signs to fill our board with, Zodio-Linko didn't have enough space to fit a triangle. Our plinko board had 57 pegs when we finished it and it took forever to paint. It did turn out good though.
|
Sasha A'HearnHigh Tech High student passionate about science and music. |