Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday's science class

Tuesday's class

We began Tuesday's science class with a nice discussion about the blog, but we were first introduced to a new student in our class Eric. After this, we talked about the blog, in particular, about when the comments and blog posts are due. Ms. D gave us a rubric on the comments and post, so that we can write the comments based on the rubric. This was a very quick discussion, so we very quickly started building with K’nex. The rest of the class we built, and finished the rest of other K’nex projects, the one’s that we didn’t get to finish last class. We all had a great time! 5 minutes before we were let out Ms. D told us to clean up, and she told us “feet up”, in case there were some K’nex pieces on the ground.* If any team left any pieces on the ground then they could lose a point.

TEAMS

~There were two teams of six people, but because we have a new student in our class, Eric, we now have one team of six and one team of seven.

Team of six

~Courtney (me) ~Valentina ~Karin ~Chiara ~David ~Jakub

Team of seven

~Tamara ~Emilija ~Ghazaleh ~Davide ~Ben ~Nathan ~Eric

POINTS

~Since I didn’t mention this before, each team needs to have 35 points to be able to build the compound machine, which is a machine that contains all of the simple machines that we learned about= lever, screws, wheel and axle, wedge, pulley, inclined plane.

Thursday's class

First we talked about simple machines, including the

compound machine. If we finished all of the simple machines, we would be able to start the compound machine this Thursday (April, 21, 2011). This was a very short discussion which didn't last long because we wanted to work on building the simple machines. Before we started building, Ms. D gave us a few tips about blogging, and the Reflection post, and then we started building!!

A few teammates testing out their machine

Friday's short block...

On Friday we were very busy, since

we didn't have much time to build.

Ms. D. gave us a few instructions

about the blog and the compound

machine, and then we all started

building.

This picture is the 'Cookie Monster

team', the other team's picture is the

first picture on this blog.

This picture is of Karin and I

(Courtney) waiting in line to

answer questions for Ms. D.

Here is a link to moodle so that you may see what all Ms.D has posted for upcoming events...

~ http://zagreb.ceesa.net/course/view.php?id=188

*Make sure to check the most recent one, those who are in seventh grade, for information about homework, K'nex, the blog...

Reflection Post

This quarter for science, I think that I did pretty well for my scribe post. I think that I improved from last quarter but I still think that I could have done better. Some things that I could improve upon for next quarter are things like:

• Color


• Science


• Depth


• Explanaton

Some things that I did well on are things like

• Color


• Explanation


• Pictures


• Links

But I think that I could do better next quarter. Some things I liked about Blogger are that I can read about what we did in class if I was sick, and that I get to let other people see what we did. Some things that I did not like about blogger is that it does not spell check, and it does not come out as you planned sometimes, but other times it works out just fine.

Knex and Quiz

For the past two classes, we did only two things:

• built with Knex
• took a quiz

For the quiz there is not much to explain so let me just get to the Knex building. For the first time we built with Knex, the girls and the boys were separated, we were to only build whatever came to our minds. And that was because we only had about fifteen minutes after the quiz. But later during the next class, Ms. D properly explained the whole project. We were separated into two groups, then we were given the task to came up with a team name. After that was done, we got our own box full of Knex parts.

When that was out of the way, Ms. D explained to us how we were going to build small simple machines to earn points.

The first step was to pick a simple machine off of a list she had given us. Next we were to build that simple machine with Knex parts the way a card showed us. when we finish building the simple machine we need to go to Ms. D and show her the machine. She needs to confirm that the machine is built correctly, and that it works. Then she will ask us a scientific question about that simple machine, If we answer correctly, we gain the number of points the simple machine is worth. We need to build a lot of small simple machines to get enough points to start building the bug multi simple machine knex construction. When the large knex construction is complete it should look something like this:

This is a project that the eighth graders did last year. They also had two teams and built the machine successfully. These are some pictures I found on their blog post.

If you want to read the post about knex last year, here is the link to last years seventh grade blog:

http://aisz70910.blogspot.com/

But on friday, Ms. D left for the CEESA Robotics competition so we had a substitute, Mr. Tim.

http://zagreb.ceesa.net/course/view.php?id=188

The next scibe is... Drum roll... David!!

4th Quarter Scribe List

People Who Still Need to Scribe:

David

Courtney

Emilija

Tamara

Karin

Nathan

Davide

Chiara

Valentina

Ghazaleh

Ben

Eric

Jakub