To be an advocate like Jesus, I know I must be able to look out for the people who are struggling and don’t have the same opportunities as me. I will show compassion and respect to those around me and provide support in my own way. I have to be able to listen to the voices of these people and to show concern for their problems. I need to be fair to enable them to have the opportunities needed to succeed, and to live a happy and fulfilled life.
Dear T
Hey, it’s Jack
Last night was wild, remember when you drank an entire bottle of soda last night. You must’ve woken up the neighbors with a burp that loud. Anyways, I’ve noticed that you haven’t been as open to me as before. You’ve been like this for a couple months now. I was so worried when you came to class with bruises on your face. I’ve heard that you’re going through a rough time at home. So I was just wondering if you wanted to hang out sometime, you know, to clear your head. Maybe we could check out that new ice cream shop. If you don’t want to come, that’s okay, but I would like to give you some advice. I’ve always believed that doing stuff you enjoy is the best way to blow off steam. You could even find something new to do. Whenever I’m stressed, I find that playing video games helps me to calm down. Instead of focusing on the stuff that makes you unhappy, push those thoughts aside and focus on the stuff that makes you happy. If it gets rough at home, you’re welcome to crash at my place any time. Just know that I’ll always be there for you. Although, if you do crash at my place, don’t bring any beers, we’re only twelve. Anyways, I hope things get better at home, bye.
From your Dear friend, Jack
Last Friday, My class and I began our final Epro8 project. Building a playground. We first had to decide what equipment we were going to make. We planned to make a swing, seesaw, slide and merry-go-round. Since it would be quite a hefty task, each group could now use two Epro8 boxes. Our group of four split into twos, each duo would work on a piece of equipment. Me and one of my friends worked on the merry-go-round while the other two worked on the swing,
We decided to take inspiration from a real park to design the merry-go-round. Of course, we weren’t master engineers so the final product was very chunky and seemed to always malfunction in some way or another. We started with the turning mechanism. The merry-go-round was to be a manual machine, we didn’t have the necessary materials to go for automation. We first had to make it turn, for this we used axles. From there we could build the rest of the merry-go-round, but it first needed a strong base. The base, once finished, was extremely rudimentary. It was pretty much a bundle of short, stubby legs. Despite it being very short and alarmingly unstable, it did its job…most of the time.
Occasionally, I glanced at what my other teammates were doing. Their job was going much smoother than ours. The swing was pretty basic, a seat attached with axles to the main body. After a quick water break, My friend and I resumed building. The merry-go-round we had in mind wasn’t exactly what we had planned. We would have never had enough materials to make an actual merry-go-round. What we were building was more of a single wide seat that spun rapidly. We began building the super wide seat which would hold our playground tester.
This is him ( I know, the picture is pretty low quality)
This seat would turn out to be the most complicated thing in the entire project. We struggled a lot and had to cut corners more than a few times. Surprisingly, we were lacking in materials even with two whole boxes of equipment. Due to this, we had a very hard time building the seat. For some reason, we decided to make the seat super wide. It didn’t have to be, we just did. We learned this was a terrible mistake the hard way, when we ran out of long bars. In the end, we built everything with extended medium bars. Once finished, we had our playground tester give it a spin. Unsurprisingly, it failed after a few seconds of spinning.
My other teammates finished way earlier, and had already built the slide and made good progress in the seesaw. We were able to finish up the entire project a couple minutes later. Before we shared our wonderful creations with the class, our tester had some business to attend to.
The swing worked fine, although the seat was abnormally small. The slide went fine, but it could’ve been steeper. Finally, the see saw was miniature compared to the other builds. We had essentially run out of any building materials, but we managed to scrape by. Now it was time to present to the class. The first group had built a seesaw, swing and merry-go-round. Their seesaw was much larger and mechanical than ours, and their swing had two big seats. The merry-go-round they had built was much smaller and less complicated than ours.
My group was up next. During the presentation, Mrs George took pictures for us to use in our blogs. To help us present to the class, we had our playground tester use some of the equipment. It took us about three tries to do the presentation, mostly because our tester had difficulty fitting in the swing. The next group had compacted all their builds in one mega-build. I can’t quite remember what builds they had, but I do know they had a slide and a flying fox.
With the presentation finished, we started the very long, very mundane disassembling process. It was the last time we would ever be disassembling, so the mood was pretty glum. The lights were off, no one was talking. The process as a whole was monotonous and uncomfortably painful. We put everything back and gave the boxes to room 7 for them to use.
I’d rate the experience a solid 8/10. I could definitely see myself wanting to do it again.
A couple weeks ago, My class and I covered angles, I had done this last year, but for many, it was a new experience. We learned what angles were, and how to measure them using protractors. To start, Mrs George covered our tables with masking tape. Then she gave us protractors. We had to measure the angles the tape created, and write it down on the tape with a pencil. My friends and I began immediately. We quickly measured most of the angles. We double checked some of the harder to measure angles. While doing this, Mrs George taught us that the interior angles of a triangle always added up to 180 degrees. We finished measuring quite quickly and began something else. We took peeled off the tape a week later. It was incredibly satisfying.
Last Friday, My class received four long, black boxes. These were our building materials for an upcoming program, EPro8. We opened the boxes carefully, inside were a variety of materials. The boxes also came with a book, to guide us on our EPro8 journey. Before we began, we were sorted into groups. Fortunately enough, I was grouped with my friends. My team and I flicked through the guide books, to see what was up ahead. We were definitely excited.
Our first activity was to build a hut. We scanned through our materials. For our main building material, we had long, medium and short aluminum bars. To join them together, we had red and blue joiners. The reds were for basic construction, like making boxes, while the blues were for building diagonally and extensions. We also had other materials, but they had very specific uses. We built a decent sized hut. About as tall as my waist. Once we had finished the basic structure, we had different criteria to meet, Such as making sure the roof of the hut is pitched. Once we had met the criteria, we dismantled the hut and moved onto the next build.
Our next objective was to build a dump truck. The truck had to have a movable bed to tip garbage out. For this, we used axles, which could rotate. We first constructed the base of the truck. It was fairly simple, just a long rectangle with two wheels on each end. Then we built the cab, which was just a box. Next we tried building the bed. We struggled trying to find a way to make it move. But through enough trial and error, we eventually figured it out. After this we had to build a handle to move the bed, which could be operated from the cab. We had no clue what to do, so we looked in the guide book for answers. We built the models shown in the book, they didn’t work but it did serve as a starting point. We experimented with many different models, but they all failed in the end. My team and I were stumped, so we resorted to watching a tutorial on how to do it. The proper handle was way simpler than the models we created. Just a couple bars attached to some axles, and with that wrapped up, we dismantled the build.
Our next project was to build a gearbox. This build was very simple, we just followed the exact model in the book. We learned a lot about gears and how they work. Once we had finished the gearbox, we started on our own experiments. We had fun turning the gear at the end, because it would make the gear at the front spin really fast. We also tested the gearbox’s lifting strength using bottles of various sizes. The build was fairly straightforward. We wrapped up that part of the build in under an hour.
That was pretty much it for the week. There is still one more challenge I need to cover, but that’s a story for another time. Anyways, here are some pictures 🙂
