Hey Everybody, today I’ll be talking about our last science project of 2023, Sparks Fly!

Sparks Fly was a mini project we did in the last few weeks of school before winter break, as you can imagine: This project was about electricity!

In the beginning of the project we learned about how we consume electricity, along with guessing how much Seycove uses in a year. Ms Kadi never gave us a definitive answer but we guessed (after counting every single light in Seycove and a lot of estimating), which led us to the guess of 227,902.62 kWh used every year (there’s a large possibility that we are way off and I ask you not to judge).

Afterwords we moved onto types of basic electrical components (resistors, switches), voltage, current, and resistance. And we showed our learning through the workshops we did where we used jumper wires and LED’s to make basic circuits, we also moved onto more advanced parallel circuits, and allegedly used too many batteries.

We also drew actual circuit diagrams that were similar to the circuits that we created in class:

In the end I definitely enjoyed this project because of all the workshops we did which made the project feel a lot more fun and interactive. Then to wrap this project up with our driving question:

“How can we be more energy-efficient at school and at home?”

There’s a lot of ways, such as being more mindful by tuning off our lights and other electronics, conserving water by taking shorter showers and fixing any leaks, reducing waste by recycling and composting, and using public transportation or carpooling instead of driving alone. There are so many small actions may seem insignificant, but when done collectively, they can make a significant impact on our environment. Another way to be more mindful is to consume your electricity more consciously, by being more aware of what we are using and where it is coming from.

I also wanna quickly talk about the fun process of making the featured image, first I started throwing some photos I took during the project into Procreate, and then I decided to do a featured image involving our circuit diagrams. Later I then realized I could replicate them in KiCad 7, a PCB Design Software. Afterwards I wasn’t sure if they actually worked since it was using actual symbols. So since I had nothing else to do I took out my Arduino Uno, A Breadboard, some wires, a LED, and a switch to test it.

And it did in fact work, so that was my process of making the featured image while also finding something to do, thank you all for reading this mini post and I’ll see you all later!