About a week ago I started work for a new BOLT in Mosaic called Rock N Roll Poetry. So far we've worked on annotating several different protest songs. Over this past week, I annotated Imagine, by John Lennon; What's Going On, by Marvin Gaye; B.Y.O.B. by SOAD; and Ohio, by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young. Tomorrow I am meeting with Mr. Schneider to talk about these songs, as well as some other's that I like.
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Can you believe that it might be possible to fill all of our energy demands for the foreseeable (many thousands of years) future with nuclear energy?
In the process of researching clean and efficient energy generation, it was inevitable that I would come across nuclear energy. For the past several days, I have reduced the amount of work that I have been putting directly into IB2 in favor of reading about nuclear energy. How it works, its history, risks and accidents, and even potential careers. I plan to continue doing this for at least another day and will create a google doc to track what it is that I am learning.
After spending a week working on the second IB, I have developed around 16 questions (and am still developing more) and answered six of those questions using fourteen sources. These questions range from simple closed questions, to the largest, very open question that I want to have an answer for by the end of this term: "How might we stop climate change?" My goal is to answer this question by finding a reasonable and realistic implementation of emerging and developing energy production technologies.
Vegas, Baby: So far in this BOLT we have discussed the difference between odds and probability, and some of the basics of how casinos, and craps, work. After about one week of working on the first inquiry block, we have finished it, and started the longer inquiry block 2. It should be similar to the first, I think, but just more time to be able to go in depth and learn more.
The first inquiry block that we did this year was kicked off at he beginning of the second week of school with a unique introduction to the new concept here in Mosaic. For several minutes at the beginning of the day everyone in the room wrote down as many questions that they had about anything on sticky notes. Once the time was up, and all of the sticky notes had been written, we put them up on the wall, organized into appropriate categories. Shortly after doing that we were allowed to walk around the room and read the questions that other people had, and even move them into a category that we believed to be more appropriate. From the questions that we read, we were told to choose several that piqued our interest the most, and to write more questions that these questions made us think of. Then finally, to complete that process, everyone chose one of the questions that they had gotten off the wall to investigate, and to develop broader and more open questions along the way, eventually forming an answer based off both their own opinion and empirical fact. ex Now, with our question in mind, we researched and asked more questions that we thought of for a week. After we had developed a number of closed questions that we felt comfortable with, we changed our original questions slightly, from a "why" to a "what if". I went from "Why is tradition important?" to "What if the world didn't have tradition?". In the process of this, I answered many of my closed questions that I had developed, including "What is the driving force behind tradition?". After that week of work on this project, everyone in Mosaic split into two groups and everyone presented their work and what they had discovered it, so that others in the group may challenge it and perhaps ask more questions of their own. Now that it's the next day, our second inquiry block is beginning. This time we are starting it by asking questions that we come up with looking at a series of wordles. However, we are not restricted to doing this, as we were for the first block. This time, if we already have a question that we wish to investigate, we are free to do so, or even continue work on the question that we had the first time around. I think that I am going to do this block about or somehow related to climate change. It is a topic that I find very important, and would like to learn more about. The school year opened with several projects in the first several days: an up-cycling project, a videography project, and a design project. All of these projects were completed in teams. For me, it was a team of three people for all three projects. In the first project that I participated in, the design project, each team was given a picture of a fictional character. Along with that picture would come a short description of the device that the character needed, and you had to design. In my case, the character was a superhero with electric powers, and the device we had to design was a communications device. We started by brainstorming some of the things that such a character would need from a communication device, and so developed a list of requirements for the system to meet. From those requirements we thought about ways to fill them, which eventually led to the development of a system logical description, or a list of elements within the system to fill the requirements. Finally, we speculated about what such a device might look like, and made a quick advertising poster for it.
The day after our design project, we were tasked with an "up-scaling" project. Up-scaling is similar to recycling, but with an increase in value from the original object. For this project we were given some time to look around a room filled with odd antiquities and construction materials, and decide what we wanted to make, and with what. We decided that we would make a cabinet out of an old trunk. Our original idea was to add windows to the trunk, but there was too much concern about how well it would hold up after cutting out large holes in the lid, as the construction of the trunk was OSB. In the end, we just taped, painted, and added a shelf to the trunk. We also fixed it (albeit not very well) to a chair we had removed the back from. The last of these projects that we participated in was a videography project, in which we were given the choice of making a documentary, instructional video, or one other category that I can't remember right now. We decided on making an instructional video, and kind of failed horribly due to organizational issues and a lack of team coordination. At the end of the day, however, we ended up with an instructional video on how to open a locker with the audio removed and music in its place At this point in the year, I don't really have very many large projects. That being said, I do have several things going on. As you can see in my "On Display" page, I am working on web design. Right now I am planning a website for myself, to act as a replacement for this one. I am also trying to build a website for another student in Mosaic. Probably the biggest project right now, however, is the food truck. I am in the business/accounting team, which is charged with making important business decisions. Recently, I have also started a project to continue over the summer, an online course in Systems Engineering.
Adding content to my archives page was an interesting process. First off, there weren't as many things to add from Drive as I had expected. This is largely do to the fact that I usually try to store my files locally, on my laptop. This allows me to work on things in the event that I am unable to connect to the internet or if Drive is not operating as it should. I was unfortunately unable to upload some of my work because it was lost earlier in the year when I experienced some issues with my laptop. What I did find on drive, however, were some rough documents and presentations from a project that had slid to the back of my mind, and I had almost forgotten about, Primary Decision. There was also a good bit of work from MEMA (sad I wasn't able to participate in Mk 2). Overall it was an odd experience, and made me think about some of the work I had done in the beginning of the year.
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Ryan WalkerThis is a place for me to reflect on my learning in Mosaic. |