Yesterday a few group members were out retrieving our weather balloon... or so I thought. When we came back to school the next morning I asked how it went and then he explained how they drove down to 3 different site one was last ping the second site was a valley that could have intercepted the package and a lookout spot to see if they could see the balloon from above. They saw a white speck and they thought it was our package and even if it was it was on private property and they wouldn't be able to retrieve it. Also it was on the Mexican American border so that was a problem because we believe that it's possible that the balloon could be on Mexican soil and it would be almost impossible to get it back then. But this was only an opportunity to learn. We learned from this that we should be very thorough with our weather checks and we shouldn't take the risk of losing our package.
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Did your semester go the way you had imagined? Why or why not?
Well I set a goal to get a 4.0 so at the beginning of the semester I was on it and getting everything in on time but towards the end I was getting lazy and not worrying as much and that led to me not achieving my goal. List and elaborate on at least three areas of personal growth. I definitely got better at putting myself in the working mindset and just putting my headphones in and crunching out some work but if i'm not in that mode then i'm barely working and distracting myself and everyone else around me. List and elaborate on at least three areas of academic growth. My writing improved a little bit of grammar and all that, but mostly my creativity and being able to write about a deep or serious topic and cover it pretty well. Also my general knowledge on chemistry and how everything works, we learned different base topics that link into everything else so now my brain can put everything together and break stuff down and find out how it works. And lastly In math WE ACTUALLY DID MATH! cause last year we did absolutely no math it was terrible but this semester I learned all about imaginary numbers and a bunch of new math that I've never done before and was able to perfect it. Did you accomplish or move closer to accomplishing any goals you had at the beginning of the semester? If so, explain how, if not, explain why. Like I mentioned before I set a goal to get a 4.0 and I came extremely close, but not quite. I already explained why this happened, me being lazy toward the end of the year then having to do all the work I put off all at once. But next semester I will achieve this goal. State and describe two goals for next semester. One in an area of personal growth and one in an area of academic growth. Additionally, very specifically explain how you plan to accomplish them. One goal I plan to achieve next semester is to make sure not only that I'm doing well in school but to help my friends if they are struggling, but to fulfill this goal I must have Excellent grades myself and also the second academic goal I will set and achieve is to get a 4.0 or higher. A personal goal that I want to set is to go to school with a positive attitude cause then I will be more happy and when I'm happy I tend to do much better work. Did you engage in our project and the work that surrounded it to the best of your ability? If yes, cite and explain examples, if no, reflect on why that was, and what could have been done differently to get you to engage. I would say yes. While my group and I were trying to launch our weather balloon we encountered weather problems so our launch was delayed a week or two. But, we improvised and drove north to avoid our balloon traveling to Mexico. When we were ready to launch we filled our balloon with helium and we realized that it wasn't enough so again, we improvised and had to delay the launch another 45 minutes cause we had to buy another helium tank but because we were all so engaged we were able to still have a successful launch even after all the problems. If you could design and execute your own semester, your own project, what would it be and why? What would you hope others would learn from it? I would design a project so that all the students would be forced to work together if they wanted to succeed because in real life we are going to be assigned to work with all sorts of different people whether they are total jerks or the kindest person ever so we should all learn now to work with all different kinds of people. What feedback do you have for us, Andrew and Adam? How could the project have been better? How could our individual classes have been better? Be a little more involved. I feel like I didn't have any personal connections with my teachers so I really couldn't talk to them about why I'm struggling. But other than that I felt that this semester and its projects were great. It turns out we are not doing our previous experiment since we didn't have a plan to make sure our fish would be 100% safe. For our next experiment we will be sending up an egg to see if the pressure will change the egg at all and if not we will be doing the worlds highest egg drop challenge. The egg drop challenge Is when you drop an egg in a cushioned capsule to try and see if you can get it to stay unharmed. But my main question is, Will the egg explode from the pressure decrease? will it expand? My hypothesis is that the pressure inside will be greater than the pressure inside the and it will just explode when the shell of the egg cant withstand it anymore. We will also be sending up and altimeter, thermometer so we can record the exact conditions that our package went to.\ We have designed our package so that it will be warm enough for the cameras to not freeze and we put a really good ball bearing fishing swivel on it so we can reduce the spinning as much as possible and maximize the quality of our camera footage.
My group and and I plan on getting a vacuum sealed container and and putting a fish inside it and and try to create an inhabitable environment for it. And we expect the fish to live and and come back down perfectly fine and and unharmed. To make all this possible we are going to need to think a lot of this over to ensure the safety of our experiment. We plan on using a hydro flask to contain the pressure and and withhold the correct water temperature for a roughly 2.5 hour period. Theoretically all of this should work but we should still test everything by using this vacuum thing that Andrew has to mock the pressure change.
VideoThe Link below will take you to our video we made using footage from our falling rocket. The footage isn't actually from our rocket because the camera died five seconds into the launch so we borrowed footage from another group. "The Kick": www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6m1Vwu9Htw Reflection
How did you feel on the first day of school compared to how you feel today? What things have contributed to any changes in the way you feel?
Well first of all I definitely feel more confident In my abilities to not only to make rockets and motors but to do things that Im not familiar with so next time I'm skeptical about doing something cause I don't know how I can think back to my progress I made during the rocket project. If you could build a third Balsa rocket, what would you do differently and why? I would use the same design but I would just make it a whole lot cleaner since my rocket went really high but it didn't look very neat and in my case the cuts weren't clean and that caused drag so I would make it look nice and improve its performance After watching some other students’ films, what themes or common traits have you noticed? It shows you how they built it and why they made their specific and unique modifications ex)"Our rocket was really short so we made it top heavy. Is there something you saw in someone else’s film, that you wish you would have done in yours? What was it? Add more humor cause it makes people pay attention and lightens the mood. Do you see value in being able to create a film about your work? Why or why not? One reason is that I now know how to use movie editing software a lot better than I did before and it also lets you reflect on the work you did. What are a few things you plan to do differently on your next film and why? I plan to get all the footage captured before I start editing cause then It will be a lot simpler and also I want to get it done sooner cause then it wont be rushed and it will be higher quality. Build/Launch #1 As you saw in our Video our rocket didn't do so well because of a few things. What we plan to do next to make our rocket actually fly is to: Make it a lot lighter, we are going to use less glue because we think that's why it was so heavy. And also use a bigger motor so that way it will for sure launch off. Build/Launch #2We made the edits I mentioned earlier and our rocket was a success! both me and my partner are proud of the work we did.
All of my clips are below: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B-hvJLHyiG0oNFcyRmpvRE96SUU?usp=sharing Final Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuERMEKmhYo |
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December 2016
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