Scientist Wanted-Final

WANTED

Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace

An English mathematician and writer who wrote the first computer program.

This week, we finished our Scientist Wanted poster. My scientist was Ada Lovelace, and I think that she’s pretty cool. Ada was born to parents with an unhappy marriage, and her father left her and her mother when she was three months old. Ada’s mother taught her math and science at home, which I think was cool. That type of education was unusual for a little girl in the 1800s, especially one of royal blood. Ada’s friend, Charles Babbage, created the first calculation program, and Ada thought it would be cool if it could do other things, like play music, do more advanced calculations, and many more things. She was describing a computer-before they were invented! I liked that Ada helped to make the calculation program much more advanced, and because of that, she is considered the first computer programmer. I think that it’s interesting that a woman became the very first computer programmer. I was not surprised, however, to hear that she died young of cancer. If she had cancer at that time, she would have died either way. There was no treatment in the 1800s. I like all that Ada Lovelace has done and I think that it’s cool that she’s a scientist.

S&EP: Communicating Information

For the poster turn-in this week, we did a Flipgrid. Flipgrid is where you film yourself talking, and then you post it to the class, so the whole class can see your video. We needed to talk about how our scientist was important and use their proper name. Once we were done, we attached the link to the poster on the video. Once we were done with that, we had to listen to another person’s video who didn’t do our scientist and respond to theirs about something interesting that we learned. I liked this way of communicating the information because it was easier to film yourself rather than present live. I also liked that we could see everyone else’s and respond to their video. I thought that was fun.

XCC: Structure and Function

This week, I noticed a structure and function relationship when my dog was running after me on my way out of the gate. The way his body is built allows him to run fast and not crash into things as he chases after me. If he had a different body, like the body of an owl, he could not run quickly. Owls do not run fast, so if my dog had another body, he couldn’t chase me as quickly.
An animal like a fox also might have a body type that would allow it to run quickly. Animals like cats, pumas, leopards and cheetahs are all built to move quickly. 

Multiplier: Wanderer

This week, I think that I was a wanderer. Another person was doing Ada Lovelace as their scientist, and if I found a good website, I would tell her about it so that she could do better on her project. I would tell her pieces of information that she didn’t know, and I would help her with some tricky requirements.

Scientist Wanted 5/20

Ada_Lovelace_portrait.jpg

This week in science, we began our scientist wanted poster. We had to choose a scientist from a long list, research the, and create a wanted poster for them. The scientist I chose was Ada Lovelace. I learned a lot about her that I hadn’t known before. Her full name was Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace, and she was born in 1815. Her parents were Lord George Gordon Byron and Lady Anne Isabella Annabella Milbanke Byron. Ada’s father left her and her mother when she was young, so her strict mother taught her math and science. Ada had an unusual education for a girl in the 1800s. I also learned that her mother made her lay still for long periods of time to teach her self-control.

Through her friend, Charles Babbage, Ada was able to take courses at the University of London. She also helped Babbage with his work: he created a program to do calculations, and Ada helped him make it more advanced. Because of this, Ada was known as being the first computer programmer. Ada also wrote some articles about machinery and was a poet like her father. In 1835, she married William King, who became the first Earl of Lovelace in 1838. This made Ada the Countess of Lovelace. Ada had three children, Anne, Ralph and Byron, and died in 1852 at the age of 36. She was buried next to the father she never knew in Marylebone, UK.

I did not know that Ada Lovelace was also a writer and poet. I also didn’t know that she died so young. I was interested about Ada Lovelace because I knew so little about her. I only knew that she was a computer programmer, considered the first. That was all that I knew about her, and I was very interested by the information that I gathered. I also found out that Ada was an only child and she worked with a lot of people. Charles Dickens even read her a passage of one of his books while Ada was on her deathbed, and she died three months later. I was really interested in this scientist because she seemed interesting to me and I had heard of her before, but I didn’t really know much about her.

SP8: Communicating Information

For this week, we had to choose a scientist, gather info and facts about him/her, and then communicate it to the class and teacher in the form of a WANTED poster. We needed to have one sentence of what they did/do (why they’re wanted), birth date, death date/current age, spouse(s), children, where they can be /could be found, and a paragraph about what they did.

XCC: Cause and Effect
A cause and effect relationship that I noticed was Saturday at my soccer game. I kicked the ball up to a girl on my team, and since I did that, I caused her to score a goal. A way to predict the effect of your kick, you look at where people are located on the field: how close they are to the goal, how many people on the opposite team are near them, how quickly they can move and all possible ways for them to score. You can then choose who to pass the ball to and hopefully you’ll score.

Project Blog

http://www.planitdiy.com/wp-content/uploads/c0d87652151198f7b5cf2ab845269eb2.jpg

This week in class, we were finishing up our disaster proof housing project. We had to choose a natural disaster and a place that suffered from it often, and then we had to design and build a model of a house that could withstand the disaster. Once we turned them in, we would test them, and the tests have very interesting results. My group chose to do flooding in Bangladesh, and I learned that Bangladesh is very close to sea level, meaning that a small storm with lots of rain could flood the area. We had to use materials that were native to our chosen area to plan out the original house that we would build, and we had to write up what we were replacing and what we were replacing it with. Our original design was very interesting. I learned that Bangladesh has lots of iron, which surprised me. I always thought of Bangladesh as a poorer country and that they didn’t have too many house building materials. Not surprising, they have wood, mud and grass, so our original house in real life would be a wooden hut plastered with a mud-and-grass mixture and coated in iron to keep out the water. It would be placed on stilts with a set of steps to get up. Our prototype had wooden walls, was placed on short stilts, and was covered in clean, white duct tape to keep out the water. When we went to test it, our teacher put it in a big plastic tub and poured a big bucket of water over it. Our house successfully kept out all water, but there was one major failure. Our house was not on the bottom of the tub. It was floating on the surface of the water, bobbing around and floating around the tub. I did learn that the house was far too light to stay on the bottom. My group and I were all very sure that in real life, the house would be strong enough to stay on the ground, but we definitely learned to make sure that it was heavy enough to pass the test. 

Backward-looking

-What problems did you encounter while working on this piece? How did you solve them?

When my group and I were working on the house, we came across the fact that we didn’t have our materials. The house was due soon, and we had a lot of things to make the interior furnishings like hot glue, popsicle sticks, duct tape and paint, but we didn’t have the wood to build the house. We were freaking out a little bit, but we finally solved the problem by taking a visit to the Maker Lab and taking some wood from there. We were able to draw out the blueprint on it, and when we met up over the weekend before testing, we were able to get it done.

Inward-looking

-What was particularly satisfying to you about either the process or the piece of work?

I liked how clean our house looked when it was done. We had covered it in shiny, clean white duct tape, which looked very nice and felt incredibly satisfying to me. I also liked (for some odd reason) how the house was floating on the top of the water. That was the reason that we failed, but it felt very happy and satisfying to me.

Outward-looking

-What grade would you give it? Why?

I would give this house a C. I decided on a C because the house didn’t have any water inside of it, which was the major part of it, but the house was not heavy enough to stay on the bottom of the tub and was floating on the top. The house was supposed to stay secured on the bottom and not move from its original position. Ours sadly did, but the major part of not letting the water in succeeded.

Forward-looking

-What's the one thing that you have seen in your classmates' work or process that you would like to try in your next piece?

I saw in multiple of my classmate's houses that they had put on a slanted roof. The water rolled off of their roofs, making their whole house dry inside. They had coated the roof also in duct tape, which helped.