Scimatics! (Metaphor Machines)

Introduction:

Hello everyone, welcome back to another Scimatics blog. Today we will be talking about our newest Scimatics project, metaphor machines. Today will be a shorter blog as per the new blog guidelines for Scimatics, so I’ll try to keep this short. Our driving question for our project was: INS. For our project we were assigned into groups, in my group I had 4 people, Mateo, Max, Cole, and Me. For our project we needed to create a Rube-Goldberg style metaphor machine where hand crafted series and parallel circuits are part of the machine. We needed to use scale diagrams to serve as the plan for the group collaboration.  Accurate measurements of dimensions and circuit variables are assessed. Today we are not going to discuss Milestones, we are going to jump right into our competencies. 

Old Mindmap:

Updated Mindmap:

Curricular Competencies:

Questioning and Predicting:

At the start of this project, I was very distracted about things on my iPad on things my peers were doing. I was not interested in this project at first sight, and I didn’t give it my all. I feel overall I would grade myself as Developing on this competency, mainly for these reasons. I had occasional distractions on my iPad, I wasn’t focused most of the time, and finally I wouldn’t put all effort into work. To sum things up, overall I feel I could improve on this part of learning in general by setting reminders or to set notes to remind me what is really important, this way I can stay on task and do my work instead of procrastinating.

Reasoning and Analyzing:

For this competency, I overall feel I was distracted, just like the last competency. I didn’t put much effort into my blueprint at all, and I overall feel I could have done a much better job if given the chance. In general, I should have looked at the basecamp document more, that way I would get a better understating in general of what to do.

Planning and Conducting:

Once again, I did not put my full effort into this competency. I feel I could have done a lot better in once again, pushing myself, reminding myself, and working together. I would give my self a developing for this competency for missing the voltage, current, and resistance values in the blueprint. Overall, I feel I should have stopping playing games in class, this would help me with focusing and overall the amount of effort I put into my work.

Scientific Communication:

Our final competency is graded on how well we did on our machine and video. And overall I’m proud of how the machine worked out, it followed all the correct criteria for this project, and I would end up saying this would be a win, except for one little detail. In our video presentation for the machine we built, we didn’t do the voice over part, which ended up getting us a lower grade. I overall feel I could have reminded my peers to get the voice over done, that way we would have actually included our voice over.

Conclusion:

In conclusion to this project, I would say overall I did an accomplished job. We ended up building what we were asked to, we used all the scientific principles and followed all the project guidelines. Even though this project was hard, it was fun to collaborate with people I don’t know very well. Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll see you in the next one.