The “Manhattan Project” Project

Recently in class we finished our first unit project making this my first official blog post of the school year. As you can probably already tell by the title of this blog post the focus of the unit was the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan project was the code name for the secret government project where the United States developed the first even atomic bombs. These bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan and officially ended the Second World War. 

Being in PLP we didn’t have a test on the Manhattan project where we would potentially loose all the information immediately after the test. Instead we had a driving question for our unit  “how did the development of the atomic bomb affect the lives of those living in the Hanford area and what role did they play in ushering in the atomic era?” To answer this question we created group videos projects to show our understanding and knowledge about our unit. Drum roll please… 

Here is our final product, the video we created:

Now let’s take a step back and look at the entire unit and how we came to this final draft of the video. At first I wasn’t sure if I would like this unit as the nuclear industry wasn’t something that originally sparked my interest. However the more I learned about this topic the more it sparked my curiosity.

When class started in September the first activity we did was testing how ethical we are by answering questions. Some of them being from the trolley dilemma which is the dilemma between sacrificing one or five lives.

This was very interesting to see how ethical everyone in my class was. If you would like to see how ethical you are you can take this quiz:

You might be wondering how this has any relation to the Manhattan project and the dropping of the atomic bombs. However as the Manhattan Project was a secret when Roosevelt the former president died, Truman became president and was became the head of the project. Truman had to make the final decision whether to drop the atomic bombs and kill hundreds of thousands of people but end the world war or not.

After starting off the unit in an interesting way we then went in more depth about why and how the United States created the atomic bombs. A very interesting part of this entire unit was how many question I had about the Manhattan project. As I mentioned before once we learned more and more about the unit I grew more and more interested. 

The reason behind the creation of the atomic bombs was in fear of the Germans creating some sort of nuclear technology first. Einstein wrote a letter warning Roosevelt about Germany’s plans which lead to the creation of the Manhattan Project. 

Leslie Groves was assigned head of the project, alongside him some very well regarded scientist worked on the project includin Fermi and Szilard. The Manhattan project employed over 130,000 people over the span of 6 years, and costed over 2 billion dollars.

One of our little projects while learning about the people involved in the project was create a character card about a scientist who aided in the project. I decided to learn about Maria Goeppert-Mayer .

This is my character card:

Maria Goeppert-Mayer was born in 1906 and came from a family where she was encouraged her to attend school and study science and mathematics. During the Second World War she began a part time job at Columbia college working on a very secret project working on the separation of isotopes with Harold Urey. They researched the different properties of Uranium and investigated into whether it would be possible to separate elements with photochemical reactions. Maria also worked alongside Edward teller in the development of the atomic bomb. The separation of Uranium-325 would later be known to fuel the first atomic bomb in history.

The Manhattan project included three main sites of production and research Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Hanford. Each of these sites basically became towns for the workers with shows, entertainment and more. These cities emerged very quickly practically overnight, many of the building for the project as well as the towns were made in less than 6 months.  The Hanford site was mainly used for the production of plutonium. Plutonium is man made and is created when uranium atoms absorb neutrons. 

Our class got the amazing opportunity to visit the Hanford site and learn about life on site as well as production of the plutonium from people who actually worked on site. This was a very interesting field study as it allowed us to get amazing interviews and ask questions that we couldn’t have just looked up the answers to online in our classroom. This field study really helped me understand what we were learning to another level and definitely helped in the creation of our video project.  If you want to learn more about the field study you can read the post by clicking down below.

 

Wait Where’s Handford?

Speaking about the video project let’s talk about the creation process of it and the different stages of critique and revision. However before we get onto that I just want to explain how the atomic bombs work. The bombs use nuclear fission which is an explosion caused by the division of atoms into smaller fragments. Nuclear fission uses uranium isotope U-235, here is a picture to show kind of how it works:

There were two nuclear bombs created little boy and fat man, used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the second bomb Japan surrendered to the united stated, and the United States celebrated. However the results of these atomic bombs was brutal killing over 100,000 people and wounding many. This dramatic moment in history is very controversial and is still debated whether it was the right thing to do today. 

So now that you know of nuclear fission works and a little bit of information on the Manhattan Project Project. Let’s go onto talking about the “Manhattan Project” Video project or the Manhattan project². The idea of this video project was to create a video with your group which covered 5 unknown facts about the Hanford site in Washington. Some of the criteria included making the video around 5 minutes and to encompass a similar theme to this video: 

My group consisted of Spencer, Kate and myself. We originally thought we wanted to base our video around 5 big unknown facts however this turned out to be too broad. Instead we decided to focus in on the theme of the environment throughout the video. Before we left on our trip to the Hanford site we actually created a completed rough draft of our video to have a solid outline of what our video would look like. 

On top of creating a rough draft before we left we also created a story outline using keynote where we showed in an interactive way what we would want to film on locations and interviews we wanted to get. Here is the keynote:

Once we went on the trip we were very prepared having already created a rough draft of our video and having a general idea of what the final draft would look like. On the Hanford site we got some AMAZING interviews with some of our tour guides. The best interview we got was with Larry who worked in the nuclear industry for around 40 years, all throughout the Cold War. This interview really added to our video and helped supported the points we were trying to make. 

After returning from our trip we then created a completed draft of our video and showed it to the class.  We got critique which was very helpful when creating our final draft of the video. For our final drafts we made slight changes to improve the video such as reduce the audio and add more photos between clips.

Overall this was a very interesting project and definitely one where I learned a lot from especially on the Hanford site from people who actually worked there. The assignment throughout including the final video project really helped me grasp and understand the ideas and opinions about the Manhattan project. This was definitely a great unit to start off the year and will be hard to beat for the next unit.