Monthly Archives: April 2022

DI (the final presentation)

A couple months ago I wrote a post about something called DI (Designation Imagination). We have finally finished this project and presented it at the DI convention last weekend. We were put into groups of 6 or 7 so you can check out one of my teammates blogs here, to see there take on the experience.

Recap 

As written in my other DI blog post our challenge was to overcome 3 different hazards (that we built ourselves) with 2 devices we built. One of the devices could use electric and the other one couldn’t. We also had to create a story to go along with our devices that was creative and worked along our robots completing the hazards.

Main challenge:

Our main challenge definitely did not go as well as I would have wanted but we still worked well as a team. Out of the 3 hazards we only were able to overcome 1 (the tunnel) but we still had a good story plot and we also showed out team choice elements well. You can watch a videos of our performance here.

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Team choice elements 

For the team choice elements we choose to do art and the costumes. To show how our everyone on our team enjoys doing art we all drew/painted on the ramp we created to show our artistic abilities. For the costumes (which I made) I bought 4 white shirts and soaked them in tee water to give them a dirty colour then I put rips and blood to make the shirts look more zombie like. 

Hazards

There were 3 different hazards we built a tunnel, a ramp and uneven terrain, I built the tunnel and the ramp. For the tunnel I made a wooden frame, like a table and then I staple a piece of tarp over it. For the ramp I also made a smaller wooden frame the I took 3 pieces of cardboard 1 for the top two for the ramp, then I duct taped the edges so it was foldable. Lastly for the even terrain we hade made a wood frame and put a piece of tarp under it, to make a kind of bag. Then we filled this bag with gravel. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Story

Our story was basically about a group of kids who our doing an online class on zoom. In this class they were leaning how to make a stuffy into a friend/pet. But the zoom call glitches and the kids accidentally but sea salt instead of regular salt which turns the stuffys into monsters. The kids decided that to lure the monsters away there going to build robots that the monsters will get distracted by. After this doesn’t work Kennan (on of the kids) runs super fast so the monsters chase him and not the others. in the end the kids learn that if they put maple leaves on the stuffys heads they turn back into zombies. The story went fairly well, it was something we did better in the performance. The judges said we had good creativity with our story but we could have made it clearer to understand.

What I learned 

During this huge DI project I learned a lot about how to work as a team and how to communicate better. Im definitely not the best t communication and Ive had trouble with it in the past but during this project I was able to talk and share lots of good ideas to help my team progress. In the end Im very proud of how our team came together and was able to show what we did. Ive also learned that next time we do DI our team should definitely meet up more and start building way earlier.

Thanks for reading about my DI experience, hope you have a great day or evening :D.

Coding with science :p

We recently just finished one of my for sure favourite scimatics projects. In this project we have to code a small game/applet in scratch about atoms. And add information explains how the KMT works.

Milestone 1: Project start 

Just like every other project we started with a Mind Map were we wrote our questions, what we knew and terms that we learnt. When we finished the project we added a section to answer our  question. You can see what I wrote down below.

Milestone 2: Building Knowledge 

For milestone 2 we drew different atomic models. The different atomic models were

Atomic model – 1808 (John Dalton)

-All matter is made up of small indestructible atoms

-Atoms cannot be created or destroyed 

-Atoms of different elements can form compounds 

Plum pudding model – 1904 (J.J Thompson) 

-An atom has no electric charge 

-In an atom both positive and negative charges are equal 

-An atom is a sphere of positive charge with negatively charged electrons inside inside like a blueberry muffin 

Nuclear model – 1911 (Ernest Rutherford)

-Atoms are mostly made up of empty space 

-Most mass in an atom is in the centre in one tiny dense positively charged core called a nucleus

-Electrons are located outside the nucleus 

Planetary model – 1913 (Niels Bohr)

– Electrons orbit the nucleus 

-The energy of an orbit is related to its size.

-Electrons move to different orbit shells when gaining or losing energy 

Quantum Mechanical Model – 1926 (Erwin Schrodinger)

-Electrons don’t move around the nucleus in orbits they move around in a cloud of electrons 

The models drew were The Dalton model – For sugar, The Plum pudding model – For sodium, The Nuclear model – For carbon and the planetary model – For neon.

Milestone 3&4: Designing and Planning  

As you know the final product of this project is a small applet/game that we code in Scratch about atoms and the KMT (Kinetic Molecular Theory). My plan/design was to create a game were you were a water molecule, and you had to dodge all the other molecules as they changed states (stared moving faster or slower).

 My first plan was definitely different to my final game. I had planned to make eight levels were the molecules slowly speed up, but then I needed up only making 3 levels each a different state. I also planned to add different types of molecules that you could play to my game but I only ended up having the water molecule.     

Milestone 5: Developing the game 

You can play my game by visiting this link, https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/658542456

Your goal is to get through the 3 different levels without touching any of the water molecules as they speed up. The programming for this game I found to be fairly difficult because I had barley ever coded on scratch before, but I was able to find some tutorials and YouTube videos on coding in scratch.  

Curricular competencies

There were 3 main competencies this project. The first one is Questioning and predicting: Demonstrate a sustained curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest. I feel like I did well on this because I actually really liked this project and I learned a lot of new cool facts.   

The second competency was Scientific communication: communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies. I also feel like I did good on this because I was able to use my iPad to find information to help me on my project.

The last competency was Reasoning ad Analyzing: Use logic and patterns (including coding) to solve puzzles and play games. Lastly I definitely did best on this because I was able to grow and learn how to code on scratch.

In the end I learned a lot about atoms and how kinetic energy works. This was an amazingly fun project, hope you enjoyed reading :].