Save Our Energy, Save our Planet

 The Power class made me realize that I take electricity for granted. Electricity is one of the most important utilities we use in the city. It connects us to the internet, lights our streets up at night, and powers appliances that make chores easier. Without Tesla and Edison's inventions of AC and DC electricity, we would be stuck in darkness. I learned how to draw a complete circuit diagram with all of the components. The math in this unit interested me because it felt connected to how real electricians understand the amount of voltage, current, and resistance runs through a circuit. For our Field Experience of the unit, the class and I took a trip to the Museum of Science and Industry, one of the last standing buildings of the World's Fair held here in Chicago. We didn't have a chance to visit the Wooden Island, a calm and peaceful area that Frederick Olmsted advocated for. It is one of my favorite places in Chicago to relax and find peace at in the summer. I was partnered with my classmate PKA to create an energy efficient circuit that is more eco-friendly than our houses in Chicago. It was difficult to create the circuit, but we took our time to create a simple, yet effective one. It was interesting to do the calculations of the voltage, resistance, and current of our circuit because it made our work affirmative. If I had a bigger circuit board, I would like to create a larger circuit with more parallel paths. 

A City of Protection

We started our last unit of "A Nation's Argument" with preparing an FE for our guests. We invited a police officer, two community organizers, and a person on board of a policing project for an assembly about Chicago policing. Three of my classmates and I were on the Agenda board. We focused on how to manage the short amount of time we had to talk about the topics we wanted to cover. We also created an icebreaker with open ended questions to start the meeting off. Other boards focused on researching the topics and history of the people who were visiting.  Since we studied about the dialect of argument, I detected the form of an argument that came up during the assembly. The argument was about immigrants staying in Chicago and if they are safe here or not. The thesis is the argument presented by the police officer. The antithesis was the counter argument presented by one of my classmates. The synthesis is the resolution between the two.

Ideas Becoming 3D Reality

In my class called “Rapid Prototyping”, we’re closing it off with our last unit called “3D”. This unit was particularly very intriguing to me, because 3D printing seemed like such a futuristic hobby to me.  We learned the specs of types of 3D printers, material that can be used for production, how to estimate the area of a function with Riemann sums, how to measure length, width, and height, and what may be good or bad to bring into the 3D printing world. The class took a field experience to the Museum of Science and Industry. We saw 3 exhibits. At the “Toy Maker 3000” , we saw a toy go through the process of being made in a factory. In “Robot Revolution” , we saw different kind of robots that do specific tasks. We also took a look at “Fast Forward”, an exhibit where we saw prototypes of inventions and the creators behind them. 
In this Action Project, we were paired up with a partner and had to go through the prototyping process to make a finished product on the 3D printer. Making our product in clay and cardboard took a lot of time. We didn’t enjoy the messy process of cutting and measuring those materials. The clay and cardboard models aren’t functional. Make our phone deck by clicking on this link. The 3D model works and serves its purpose. We were very happy with the results. 

Hero's Journey

In the last unit called “Journeys” in our Stories class, we learned about what makes up a hero’s journey. We created slides to analyze 2 hero’s; a fictional and a real hero. It was a bit hard to decide on what heroes to choose, but I have always loved the movie Wall-E, so I thought I could write about it pretty easily. I watched the movie again to refresh my thoughts, and wrote down elements that made Wall-E a hero. I never analyzed a movie that intense before, so I noticed a lot of new innuendos and jokes that I never caught as a child. I liked learning about the components of a journey and compare it to other stories. An adventure really shapes a character into a better, more confident version of themselves. I feel confident in writing stories with meaning and with characters with a purpose.

The two heroes that we chose were Wall-E and Abraham Lincoln. Wall-E is the fictional hero and Lincoln is the real life hero. I also chose Abraham Lincoln because he doesn't relate to Wall-E in a physical sense; he is a real life human being. We are familiar with Lincoln as him being our 16th president, but he is also a hero for saving slaves from imprisonment for no good reason. I chose Wall-E because he is an awkward, lonely, curious robot that wants to find purpose in the world. He is very determined to hold hands and fall in love with a robot that visited Earth, named Eve. Eve took Wall-E's plant away from him and shut down. He gained a lot of courage from going after the plant and Eve. We also studied Abraham Lincoln, which went through a lot of ridicule and fights to ban slavery. He died for fighting for what is right. Wall-E almost died, but Eve saved him. They both faced fear, trials, mean characters, sad situations. They both won a battle that they didn't think they would win.

I have a slideshow that follows Lincoln's and Wall-E's adventure.