This year will be my third year part of this program, and a staple in PLP (Performance Learning Program)are the field studies. Last year our class flew down to the Deep South for an in depth look into the Civil Rights Movement, and I experienced multiple amazing things that could not be replicated in the classroom. This year we took a field trip down to Washington and Oregon early in September. The purpose of this years field study was to achieve first hand learning on the Manhatten Project, and the contributions made at the Hanford site to the project.

The Manhattan Project was the code name used for the production of the first atomic bomb. After word of Germans utilizing the ability to split atoms and create massive amounts of energy and using this as a weapon, Albert Einstein sent a letter to the president notifying him that America must do the same. The production of this weapon utilizing the splitting of atoms became the number one priority of the United States. This project lead America to beat Japan in the Second World War, ending the brutal fighting and bringing victory to America. Research for the project was conducted all across the United States, and in some places in Canada. Some of the primary sites research was conducted were Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and of course The Hanford Site. The Manhattan project brought amazing new technological advances in the field of radio activity such as X-rays, microwaves, and other medical advances.

Our class was assigned the project to create a video following the guidelines set by a program called History in 5. Like History in 5, we covered five separate topics discussing different attributes of the Hanford site during the Manhattan project. Before leaving our school, Seycove Secondary, we created our own groups for our projects. Each group was comprised of people with similar interests, and my group decided to focus on the role women played at Hanford. Our group was comprised of Zakaria, Marley, Michael S, and Jayden. Each of us had our own focus points, and mine was “The Women who Came From Millitary and Voluntery Services to Aid at the Hanford Site”.

The other focus points in my group consisted of:

Jayden: recruitment of employees for the Hanford Site.

Zakaria: Discrimination against women at the Hanford Site.

Marley: Leona Woods, the only head female physicist working at Hanford.

Michael: The Hanford Site today.

I conducted my research through the Internet, museums, and interviews from retired employees of the Hanford Site and park workers. Before we left on the field study, we completed multiple assignments, conducted online research, read books, and watched videos. Collecting an immense amount of footage and knowledge, I put the video together once we arrived back home. Being in PLP greatly changed the production and content of this video. Being in a normal high school class, this video would have been extremely bland and linear. Instead, we got to collect our own footage at the real Hanford site, and indulge in our own interviews with multiple different people. Draft after draft, our group underwent many fierce rounds of critic from teachers, parents, and classmates, and this greatly helped the outcome of our video. I created our videos intro graphic using a program called Render Forest. Here is the final draft of our video.

I had an amazing time on the field study. We left Vancouver on Wednesday the 21st, and arrived back in Vancouver on Sunday. We all greatly enjoyed the restaurants (as always), the movie, museum, Reed College, the road trips, the tourist attractions, and of course the tour of site itself covering Hanford before the war and the site when it was active.

Without the opportunities to visit the real Hanford, and meet all the people featuring in our movie, the learning I achieved would not have been possible. The Hanford site immensely affected the manhatten oroject, which was a staple in world history. While working on our video projects at school after we had gotten back, the superintendent of our schoo, district was paying us a visit. He was extremely interested in the work we were doing, and invited one of the group to present at the board meeting. Surprisingly enough, our group was chosen to present. 

This was a nerve-racking expirence for me, as I don’t usually present informs of people. Practicing my part of the presentation in the room next to where we were presenting was only making me more nervous. Marley, Michael, Zak, Jayden, and I then proceeded to start our presentation. To my pleasant suprise, the presentation went extremely well. I feel that having my friends up their presenting by my side helped ease my nerves a bit. After presenting, we were asked questions from the board about the program and the learning we acquired on this field study. I am very thankful for this opportunity to present to the board which, as usual, would have never happened have I not been a part of PLP.