October 2016 – Inside Angela Chirico

Barbie in the Dream House

Angela on October 31, 2016December 6, 2016

Hello friends and welcome to my humble abode! Today we will be covering my most recent math project: The Dream House. The house that only exists in your dreams, has come to life! YOU get to see the house everyone’s been going crazy over, The Tatgela. Creative name, right? It wasn’t easy putting together this masterpiece, we had quite a bit of stuff we needed to do before building it on the app. Before we made the design, we studied scale factor and did some worksheets similar to what we did for the Dream House. After that, we were given some time to work on designing and building the house. The designing was fairly easy, but when we began building it in the app we ran into a few road blocks. The first was the stairs, which I couldn’t figure out how to build a second floor even though we’d already designed one.

The second difficult part was the kitchen. I hated that thing. It was very hard to follow all the rules, such as
-appliances must not be blocking each other
-The fridge, dishwasher, and oven must be ___ far away from each other.
-etc

Eventually we made it work, but there was another problem with the app. After I’d already built the kitchen, dining room, and living room, all my work was deleted after I joined back into the app.
So, in summary, I had a lot of fun doing this project but it was frustrating at times. I used an app called RoomPlanner to make this project. Be sure to tune in soon for part 2 of my metaphor machine!

Metaphors Be With You

Angela on October 31, 2016

Welcome back to the blog you tried to avoid. This blog is true punishment, and yet you read it anyway. It’s not always bad, right? It’s like they say: a good pun is it’s own reword.

In Flight this year, we’ve all been working really hard on our latest and greatest project; The Metaphor Machine. At the moment, we’re about halfway through and I’ll walk you through what we’ve done so far. If you read through my other posts that I’ve recently posted here, you’ll see that I’ve posted a bit about Crane Brinton, Steampunk, and the industrial revolution. All of these are involved in this project. For this project, we had to first make a timeline with all the events of the assigned revolution. Our group chose to do the russian revolution. The timeline also had to include metaphors we wrote that connected to the events in the revolution and how it relates to Crane Brinton’s Theory . In the machine, we had to give it “Steampunk Aesthetic” to give it more life. We do this by bringing in steampunked decor and by painting parts of our machine in copper, silver, and black.

This project also needed to include a circuit of some kind, and it was very convenient that we’ve been studying electricity in science. Once the timeline was approved, we drew a blueprint of our machine on paper. We used the timeline as our guide to building the machine. Before we started building, we needed to sort out who was bringing what. Some of the materials took longer to get, and that made finishing the first draft of the machine by the due date challenging. We probably could’ve been more productive in the first few classes but that was pretty hard because not many of our materials were in order. But as time progressed, so did we. We drew on the wood where we wanted to have the parts and we ended up eliminating an idea that wouldn’t have been all that easy to do. We began building and painting parts of the machine. The hardest part of putting together this machine was realizing that some of our ideas won’t work. An example of this was when we wanted to make a scale but instead of using those plates on the scale, we’d replace them with top hats. The idea was creative but the top hats we made were fragile and didn’t work the way we had originally wanted them to. Our machine is sequential, so we’ve been building everything in logical order.
We made a 2 minute video that goes over the process we went through when we made the project. To help the video, we were given a storyboard that will be the outline of the video. What I think will make our video special and unique is the fact that we decided to make it with the same style as the show “How it’s Made”. We’ve been documenting a lot of the process of this project. We always try to have one person in our group filming or taking pictures of what we’re working on. This project has been really fun and I’ll have a part 2 to this blog post up soon!

All These Trains and We Still Ain’t on Track

Angela on October 17, 2016

Recently in Flight, we’ve been studying revolutions. Mainly, the Industrial Revolution in Britain. We were assigned a project where we had to make an explain everything answering this question: what were the causes and consequences of the development of the railway during the Industrial Revolution in Britain? There was lots of criteria that we had to follow to make this visual essay. For example, our video must include a beginning, middle, and end, show at least three different causes (the reason why/how railway had that change) and their consequence (the impact of that change), and more. We did lots of research on the Industrial Revolution and the causes and consequences of the development of the railway in Britain.

Our teacher had us hand in multiple drafts of this project. My first draft was very bad to say the least. It had no audio at the beginning and no conclusion at all. It covered pretty much everything I’d wanted to go over, but it was still very lacking. I’m disappointed to say my second draft was all that much better. I added a few more things in and tweaked it a little, but I would just call this mild improvement. The process of making these things can take so long. Especially when Explain Everything deletes your audio after you’ve recorded. Over and over again. My life is a train wreck.
My final draft is the one. It’s the masterpiece everyone’s been missing in their lives. It’s the peanut butter to your jelly. The Mona to your Lisa. This one has taken the cake. I spent more time on this than I should’ve but it was kinda fun in a way that you would only understand if I explained everything. I am a person of low expectations. Please feel free to follow in my footsteps when watching the following presentation. Now, for what you’ve all been waiting for: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v3aT4q_BwE

How large of an impact do you think the railroads have on the industrial revolution?

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