Pig Dissection

The Pig Dissection was engaging and educational. The smell of the preservatives was very pungent, however from this experience I learned a lot about the parts and functions of the body. The plasticiser helped show where the veins and arteries where by color coding them. With a few differences, pigs are very similar to humans so this helped show how human anatomy would be without actually dissecting a human. This dissection helped me relate concepts learned in vodcasts in the Physiology unit to real life applications. It was especially interesting how we could see the digestive system in a way other than a diagram. Most of these ideas I knew before hand in theory however this dissection helped me learn how to identify the organs on an actual organism.

20-time Individual Reflection

Equation we used for calculating lift.

   In this project we chose to do a project to build a RC hot air balloon, we chose this because the project was going to last the whole semester so we wanted to try to do something that would take a lot of time and be hard. The focus of this project was to create something that hadn't been made too often so we could see what we could do to perfect it's design.

   The initial plan to achieve the goal was to have a couple months of research and then the rest of the semester we would work on building it.

Idea for built in remote control electrophoresis for
hydrogen balloon. (to dangerous to test on a large scale)

   As we started the project, we soon realized that this would require much more research than we thought we would need. Our choice of balloon envelope material changed from plastic bag to nylon to silicone coated nylon to paper to urethane coated nylon to thin plastic bag and so on. We also researched in the use of hot air, helium, and hydrogen for lift. My robotics and planning for my eagle scout project took more time than I anticipated so I had less free time to work on the project than I thought. However in researching the project I learned many new things about physics, material properties, and electronics. We would first research something and then test it for effectiveness, like putting it over a candle to test it's heat resistance. All class time for this project was used efficiently and out of class research time was used also. Overall I think this was a successful research project, however we are not yet finished with building a prototype.

   While doing this project I learned many process skills by working with my partner Will. We communicated together both in and out of school to collaborate on our research for the project. If I had done this project again I would have started with a smaller scale. I have learned that I sometimes try to be a bit too ambitious, however I think this project is achievable with a bit more time.

Diagram of simple hot air balloon idea

   Over this summer, Will and I will continue to work on this project in building a physical prototype for the RC hot air balloon. Since we have already done so much research on this topic we know what works well and what works bad, so it is just the building we need to do now. The research we have done was a good learning experience and I can't wait to make a physical prototype of our ideas and designs.

Unit 9 Reflection

  This unit was about the classification of species, and the characteristics by which they are classified. Species where originally classified into 7 levels, however nowadays we classify into 8 taxonomic levels. The levels from broadest to smallest are: Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. The Bacteria and viruses vodcast explained how Bacteria can be classified as gram-positive or gram-negative, and viruses infect cells and force the cell to create more of the virus. The fungi and plants vodcast explained their properties and how they are classified. In the many vodcasts about chordates and invertebrates we learned the characteristics of many phylums and classes in the kingdom Animalia. Classification might seem tedious and useless, however it is significant in sharing scientific observations and understanding genetic relationships. I want to learn more about the classifycation of different species and their characteristics so that I can better understand their evolutionary relationships.

Budding video used in What on Earth Presentation

   In this unit we also did a What on Earth Presentation. We had the ability to choose our own organism to research and do a presentation for in front of the class. My presentation was on yeast and it can be viewed below. The requirements for this project where more vague and allowed us the option to research and report on what we thought was important on the topic. This gave us more freedom to choose what we presented about. For my project I did a lot of research however I only presented the parts that I thought where useful and people would like to know, instead of putting in all the information that I could find. For the slides I used less wording and more pictures because it was a presentation and not a report so people would look more at the pictures instead of the words. To enhance people's understanding of the topic of budding I added a time-lapse of the budding process that I found on YouTube to the presentation. To make the presentation more apparent to everyday life I spent most of the presentation describing how yeast is used in everyday things such as bread, alchlohal, or root beer. Overall I think that the presentation went well and in the process I learned how to make a presentation accurate and engaging without incisive guidelines.