We are finally all done with Capstone. I, personally, can’t believe it. At the start of Capstone 1, Charlie and I were in way over our heads. We had the whisper of an idea of what we wanted to do, which made us think we were hot shots. We were not. I think we changed a lot through this year, and a good amount of that I would credit to Capstone. It was difficult. It was time consuming. It was a year of struggling to make deadlines. But it was needed. I am on the other side and much better for it. It helped me write better essays, read scientific articles easier, and speak in front of a large audience without fear. Or with little fear. Less fear? Public speaking is scary and Capstone helped it a little bit, okay. Let’s give it some credit. I was not very good at public speaking before Capstone. Look at me now! Speaking in the black box like some kind of daring knight from the Middle Ages. Charlie feels pretty similarly. He struggled with writing a bit more than I did before Capstone 1, but he has improved so much. He is so much better at writing quickly thanks to these blogs, and formally, thanks to our proposal. He also improved in his public speaking skills. We are both so glad Capstone is over, but I know neither of us would be where we are now with public speaking or writing without it. Tags:#Collaboration #Problem Solving #Communication
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The week before finals and the only thing left to do was our Launch pad profile so we will be ready in end of May for the Expo fest. This consists of uploading three videos, our references, cover image, advisers, and answer some questions about our project. Our teacher was kind enough to help lay out a rough schedule of what with have to get done on each day of this week. So far Connor and I have gotten everything done on our each day besides the “Big Pitch” and “Big Bang”. The reason we had done this is because the school is forcing us to take an electronic test to measure where our levels of math and reading skills are. I understand that these tests have the opportunity to help students, but this test is just treacherously long and in my opinion was such a waste of time. Besides the test and filling out the Launch pad profile, Connor and I have been practicing for final presentation in front of our class one last time. I personally think this will be for the better even since our judges on presentation night were very harsh while judging us and allow our teacher to view our presentation for herself. Tags: #Collaboration #Communication Chaos. Utter chaos. Capstone night was, in my opinion, a hot mess. Nothing went smoothly. The clicker to change slides wouldn’t connect in the Black box, no one was there for our presentation, and the posters for science fair weren’t printed. That was by far the worst part to me. It affected all Capstone Science fair projects in Bio. It was so messed up: I can’t believe a teacher would do that. I mean I can believe it, but he better get some serious repercussions. He totally disregarded the hard work we did for a full year, because he was lazy. I’m furious. It is absolutely unacceptable… We should sicc Hel on him, and maybe the Gluttony Gang too. I know in the long run it isn’t important for capstone,but it made me feel utterly defeated. Charlie and I got to see our rubrics from the judges today too. I know being in the Black box meant harder judges, but they were hard judges. Truely, I was a poet in my former life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m so happy we got into the Black box.As someone who has struggled with social anxiety, being chosen as A Good Public Speaker is unreal to me. It feels amazing, and I’m so happy with how far Charlie and I have come. I would like to think it is a pretty nice contrast to being a freshman who couldn’t order a coffee on his own, or an eighth grader in speech therapy. Both of us now are actually good public speakers. Even amidst all this chaos, (and said anxiety reminding me he’s still here) we did it. We put our blood, sweat, and tears into this beast of a project, and I am so happy with how far we’ve come. #Responsible Citizenship #Problem Solving Nearing the end of the project I have felt more stressed than ever. With the deadline being right around the corner. With so much to do not only in this class but all the other ones as well with the deadlines being next week. We have only the second draft of our conclusion and discussion left to work on for the paper. The other part we have to work on is our website. With the disconnection with our mentor that was helping us with the raspberry pi, we had talked with our teacher about having moving to it being installed till after break to allow more time on figuring out how to work the raspberry pi. With all this said we are planning on working on the discussion on Monday of next week and the conclusion with the our teacher’s first rubric of it on Tuesday. On Wednesday we are going to look over the website and add anything else that is needed. Connor and I had noticed that the crested geckos had started to get thinner. In a hurry we had done some research and had found out that it is normal for crested geckos to get thinner during the winter months. So we are planning on monitoring them closely and making sure that they aren’t that thin when winter is over. Tags:#Information Literacy#Collaboration It’s been years since we’ve seen a cricket around these parts. Sometimes if I close my eyes and listen really hard, I can almost hear one, softly, in the distance. But in all seriousness it has been difficult taking care of our animals without crickets. We do have dried mealworms to use as a supplement, but they aren’t as healthy as live crickets. Plus, the frogs and cresteds are less fond of pre-killed foods because they naturally want to hunt rather than eat from a bowl of still worms. I’ve gotten the cresteds to eat mealworms at least by hand feeding, but frogs aren’t a fan of being hand feed, so I can’t know how well they’ve been eating. Today, finally, we got crickets. Thank the reptile god, we got crickets. The frogs and cresteds had a feast of fresh insect flesh. I’m glad they prefer to hunt, they need the exercise. By they, I mean the frogs. The frogs are greedy, greedy little creatures. Don’t get me wrong, I love the frogs, but they are greedy gluttons. The roaches have been much less stressed lately. I’ve been giving them peas and they seem to really enjoy that. They’re a good source of protein so I think that’s what has increased the stress behaviors. The roaches will fight for food and will even cannibalize--and I stop this blog post for an important notice: Our frogs first croaks! I mean, probably not their first, but the first we heard. It freaked Charlie and I out because we were behind the enclosure and we heard this distorted high pitched choking noise. We both jumped, but saw it was just one of our frogs croaking. It was loud and neither of us were expecting it. I guess our frogs are starting to mature. They grow up so fast. It seems like just yesterday Charlie and I were transporting them into the vivarium. Tags: #Collaboration #Problem Solving With only 22 days left capstone night I feel prepared and unprepared at the same time. Overall the enclosure had came out better than I had expected and I really enjoy how it’s doing. I get the sense of unpreparedness from how much more we still have left in such a short amount of time.One major part of this is the raspberry pis section of our project. Due to the school work of highschool and filling out college essays. That part of our project has gone untouched for sometime now. As a goal I want to get the sensors working and get back in touch with our mentor We have done gotten a draft and are basically done with our results section and had already made a draft for our discussions. With the 21st of December approaching I feel that Connor and I can most likely be able to complete out project and paper in the remaining time. The other more current thing that we have to do is completing our task sheet. So far we have completed the blog, just need to present the results presentations, and have updated the website. We just need to finish adding the rest of the leaves to add more decoration to te enclosure; this will also provide more hiding and climbing for the animals. In other news, there is a shortage of food, specifically crickets. Due to unknown reason a specific teacher keeps forgetting to bring in crickets for the animal lab. As a solution to this problem Connor and I have brought in some dubia roaches and wax worms for the animals to get a treat and give time for the crickets to arrive. Tags:#Creativity & Innovations#Communication#Information Literacy#Collaboration#Problem Solving Ayy, so ya’s probably heard of the Gluttony Gang, yeah? Well all I gots to tells ya is that I’m the head honcho there. All these roaches and geckos quiver in our shadow. We’s got’s first dibs on all the crickets up in here. The big guys tryna take away our stash. Theys feedin the crests behind our back. Special delivery an everythin. I gotta cut off their supply I’ve sent Greer and Gwen out to try’n scope out the scene out there, but the big guys keep bringin em back before they can rendezvous. Giraffe wants ta try, but I keeps tellin him he’s too young. He’s like my own kid, I couldn’t do it. We’s gotta keep em safe. I don like given up my terf ta these crests, but without us in control of the food, we gots no leverage. I don’t wanna risk my guys to fight them. Whats I’m thinkin is wes gonna jump the big guys next time they try their special delivery. We gotta teach em we’s in charge here. I can’t be da boss without that fear factor, ya know. The roaches are totally scared o us. They don even try to get any crickets. All theys do is nibble on the weird green circles and big orange chunks. Sometimes theyd try nibbling the dry worms, but I think I scared em off. Didn’t do nothin, but I definitely scared em off. Glad I didn’t have ta show em. Those guys are freaky. They keep makin these weird hisses at eachother. It gives me and my guys the heebie jeebies. Course, we won’t let em know that. We’s been actin natural. The roaches been stayin on they terf, and the crests been keeping to the vines. The big guys put up these vines an it’s been aight. Keeps the crests from our terf. Otherwise, don’t got nothin goin on, pretty relaxin livin here. Plenty of food, good company, lots to explore. What else could a frog need? Tags;#Creativity & Innovations This week has been quite uneventful. Monday we had no school and Wednesday and Thursday we had half days. Also our fake leaves had arrived the other day. We had starred setting up the leaves on the upper part of the screen that separates the heat lamps and the animals. We going to be setting the leaves in the front and sides of the enclosure to give the animals more hiding and make the enclosure more appealing to the eye. We are planning to help secure the leaves to the screen with black zip ties so that they aren’t hanging down and those are for more of a decoration purpose then for the animals to hide in or rest on. We also have a braided strand of three lines of leaves. This strand hangs lower that allows the animals to sit there if they want. We are also planning on adding vines that are like the we have currently to add even more climbing space for the animals. The reason why we are doing this is to add more hiding for the animals and due to them loving the other fake leaves we have in the enclosure we are planning to add other hiding options for them. Besides that we had done some fundraising again by selling cookies during the report card conferences. We were able to sell all 106 cookies again making roughly 53 dollars. This is will help us cover for the leaves and other decorations we decide to put into the enclosure. Hopefully we will be able to use the remaining money to pay for any other expenses or things that we will need to buy in the future. #Creativity & Innovations#Communication Most importantly, before I talk about anything else, a frog jumped into my hair. A green tree frog, from this vivarium Charles and I took so long to make perfect, attacked me in his own home. I was leaning into the enclosure to grab something, and I felt a wet thud on top of my head. I heard Charlie walk up behind me, “Don’t move. Connor you have a frog in your hair.” I knew. It didn’t hurt the frog at all but it hurt me. Emotionally. I took a shower as soon as I got home. My hair is special to me and that frog just attacked my sense of self. Rude frog. He doesn’t even pay rent. I bet he throws eggs at his teachers’ cars. Hooligan. Now that we got that… situation out of the way this blog can continue as planned. The frogs are about 90% stomach I think. They are ravenous, and we’ve been hand feeding the cresteds to keep them well fed. Persephone accepts actual hand feeding, but Hel and Nova prefer feeder tongs to carry in their meals. The hissing cockroaches seem to be suicidal. Even though we put in more rocks into the big water dish, one tried to drown itself again. We caught this one luckily, but it makes me nervous that these roaches are so determined to drown. At least it’s a confounding variable I suppose. The fact that they have water and it’s humid enough for them shows that they did not seek out that water because they had no other option. The seeked it out because they think they can mess with our results. I’m onto them though. I know what they are planning, and I have a spy on the inside. This isn’t Nova’s first rodeo. She’s my eyes in the sky. She’s wired and reporting the roaches every movement back to me so I can plan ahead of them. I have no idea where this tangent came from whoops. Tags: #Communication #Creativity & Innovations This week we had started working on getting trying to get our programing to run and setting up the hardware for the raspberry pi. We are primarily focusing on the temperature and humidity sensors. This will allow us to see that the hardware and software works together. Our mentor, Tony DeGennaro, had showed us this code called Terrarium Pi from a website called GitHub. GitHub is an open source website for creators to put up there code for free use. Not only does this give us the majority of the coding we will need but it is also will put the data collected into graphs. A terrific scene was awaiting Connor and I when we had walked in this morning. One of the roaches had died; this was due to it falling into the large open source of water. Due to this we had to drain most of the water to remove any risk of any other roaches following their friend’s actions. We had placed rocks into this water source before;obviously this hadn’t worked and we are going to bring in some more pebbles and rocks to make it safer for the cockroaches. This could be a sign that they didn’t know where there safe water source is. We will probably also had another source of safe drinking water for the roaches on that side of the enclosure. The silver lining of this incident is that it wasn’t due to the being stressed due to stress; just an unfortunate event that had occurred in this enclosure. Upon all this stress we also have the quarter closing tomorrow. Also the first draft of our results are due next Thursday. This isn’t to bad due to it only needs the data we have currently collected and a sentence or two explaining what the data is. Tags:#Collaborations #Problem Solving #Communication #Creativity & Innovations |
AuthorSConnor O'Clair Archives
January 2019
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