In humanities lately we have been learning about the end of WWII, more specifically the Manhattan Project. We started off with learning about the first Nuclear Bomb being dropped in Japan. It was a huge deal as it had never been seen or heard of before. What the Americans did revolutionized war, and how it would be fought. We actually did a small project on how the news would tell the world.
After that, we started to delve deeper into the Manhattan Project and what it was all about. We first learned the basics which was about how the Manhattan Project started out as the idea that would end the war if they did it before the Germans. One of the first things the Americans did was secretly buy areas of land that were isolated and in the middle of nowhere, as they needed this to be a secret. They even told people that they had 30 days before they had to be out of their house, of course they gave them money for their house but many would say it was way below market value.
We then started talking about what they were doing with these areas. The main thing was uranium and plutonium production for the nuclear bomb, and one of them was built for a test site. We discussed how they got the plutonium and uranium as it is not something you can buy from you closest supermarket. They essentially just had to mine it but it was really hard to find, and they got Canada involved in it as Canada had a lot of useful uranium that they could use.
Lastly before we started working on the end project we learned about the science behind the Atomic Bomb, we learned about you could do it through Fission and Fusion. Essentially one way was to split an atom and the other was to force two atoms together. The end goal of both processes is to create a chain reaction, which is what happens when a nuclear bomb is detonated.
After we had learned the basics of everything we then were told we were going to have to do a large project on the Manhattan Project. We had to essentially make a video that included 5 facts about the manhattan project, relating to Hanford which is where the first Nuclear Reactor was built and where we were going on a field study. We were put into groups of three and told that the first thing we had to do was think of a topic to base the video off of. We thought that we should base it around every day life at Hanford. That was specific enough to the point where we could go into enough detail that after the video the people who watched it would actaully learn something but at the same time it wasn’t too specific that we didn’t cover very many topics.
At first we essentially made a script and planned out what we were going to do while we were in Hanford and what we thought was the most important things to cover while we were down there.