Scimatics- What have we done so far?
On the first day of school all the little confused tiny grade 8 students walked upstairs to their first math class of the year, where we were greeted by a high spirited Mrs. Klausen. She welcomed us weird little humans to sit down and have some tea. So of course being scared little grade 8’s on our first day we sat down and did exactly what she said.
Through the week we were told that in Scimatics the iPad was just a learning tool and if we were caught gaming in her room we would be in trouble. So of course many people still gamed. Thats stopped mostly. Other things that we learnt was that there was always a choice in Mrs. Klausen’s classroom and that its ok to be wrong. Now our faces when we herd “its ok to be wrong” looked like-
However now when we hear it we don’t look like that and we look more like
Throughout the year we have done a few big projects in math, including our “my door is a bore no more” project, our minecraft project, and our current project I shall call our “build a business at Seycove” project. These projects have taught us how to be wrong and try again. We learnt that its ok to be wrong. Even if it means we need to start again.
My door is a bore no more
We were told “its ok to make mistakes” so, a project to test what we had learnt in our geometric math part of math came through. So came forth the project My Door Is A Bore No More. Where we were all given a surface area to cover with 3D shapes to increase the surface area of the door. By doing that we all had to come face to face with being wrong- wrong measurements, wrong readings and ideas that wouldn’t work. Soon there was a classroom filled with people working on making shapes that would fill the surface area for their group. Tape was being passed around, scissors, paper and rulers were being requested. Everyone was on a crazy rampage. One group even drew faces and coloured their shapes. My group made one huge cube that was made of annoyingly-floppy blue paper. It stood out a lot. Literally. Soon the door had shapes hanging from it, falling off it (stupid tape) and had kids trying to fix the fallen shapes. It was a good project that let us face the “it’s ok to make mistakes” challenge. We were in groups of 3. My group was Alivia and Melanie. We all worked quite well together and we did what I think was a pretty good job on this project.
Photos and notes from “my door is a bore no more”:
Minecraft Project
First we were separated into partners. My partner was Melanie (link to her blog at end of post along with everyone else mentioned in the post). The project was to build a structure from an ancient place that has been updated to be earthquake proof. We decided to make a Greek structure and instead of having the structure with the traditional strait columns, we decided to turn them into arches and add y-beam supports. That way, the structure wouldn’t die if the roof tried to collapse and the harm would be minimum to the building. We spent a few weeks building this structure. This was over “it ok to be wrong” challenge. Because Melanie and I had the wrong measurements and had to double the side of our structure after we finally finished. Then we had to figure out cost, had to count A LOT of blocks, and think about having to make a surrounding that would look like Greece. That took time as well as we made our building on a flat world on Minecraft (one that is just one big grass field with no tress or anything). So as well as having to make a structure we had to make an ocean as well.
Photos of the Minecraft project:
Mini Business
After winter break I returned to find that we were starting a new project! We were making a mini business. We were going to make a survey to find out what the students of Seycove wanted. Then we were going to sell them. This project is still in the making. My group (Raina, Emily and I) are going to sell chocolates. So the survey we pushed out was about what kinds of chocolate people would want to buy. From the results we received- people at Seycove like solid milk bars and caramel filled chocolate bars. So those are the two kinds of chocolates that we plan on selling to the students of Seycove. With this project we also did some study’s on things like “markup” and “mark down” prices. This kind of disturbed me. A $100 box of lego was made for about $2. But the price just goes up and up as the product goes through the train of marketing.
We’ve also done a few things in Science. Most recently that has been our class using microscopes to look at things like, lung cancer part, human blood, plant cells, and animal cells. We got to look at these things with the Microscopes and I think its safe to say quite a few people were interested. Which is good because we are doing a project with cells. A battle between good cells, viruses, diseases and things like that. We were put into groups and we will (in our groups) be making and studying a certain cell or virus and get to make a model and have them hung up to show the battle.
Other group people’s Blogs-