Here at Ann Richards everybody holds you to a higher standard than they do at regular middle schools.I think that this is part of the reason why we strive to be perfect and when we fail we as students often think very badly of ourselves. Failure is a big factor in life and people have been making mistakes since day 1 but still i have trouble coping with certain kinds of failure.I feel like this year may have been the year where i made the most mistakes in my classes.I often struggled the most with my math class.

I have always struggled the most with math but for some reason each year just got harder and harder.This year i was getting a lot of C’s on assignments and sometimes even F’s.I often would tell myself jokingly that I was so stupid or that I can’t do this equation because i’m too dumb when in reality I just wasn’t trying hard enough to surpass my failure. It wasn’t until my grades started to effect what I was allowed to do that I even realized I needed to do better,which i tried to do but again I failed.Thats when I knew instead of trying to teach myself something I didn’t understand why not get a tutor.

When I started getting tutoring I actually for once started to understand math and equations,I even learned a bit of algebra.I now have been getting A’s and B’s on assignments and turning in my homework finished with the correct answers. What I learned from my experience with failure is that telling yourself that you’re incapable of creating the task due to failure is absolute worst thing you can ever do because if you tell yourself you can’t then you won’t.Also that it’s ok to need help because nobody’s perfect at everything. I know can fully understand what teachers mean when they says that it’s ok to fail as long as you take your experience and do things with that experience.

These are my grades throughout the year.

 

This year in PLTW we created a 4 month long project called a Maker Project, which we presented at the MakerFaire. I’m in Girl Scouts, and decided to do my silver award this year. A silver award is an award given to a Girl Scout who created a project that helps the community outsides of Girl Scouts. I chose to pair my silver award project with my Maker Project, and brainstormed a project that would benefit a needy community. The community I chose was underfunded schools in Austin, and I decided to create a website that would enable people to donate and volunteer to the schools through the website. I teamed up with Darby Buscemi, and we started our journey through coding.

In the beginning, I researched schools and coding, while Darby created a logo for the site through photoshop. The logo took 4 days, and made us incredibly tired, but my job was coming up. I did all the coding, which took the majority of the time. Darby tirelessly contacted school after school, even though many hung up on her, never answered, or just said no.

We faced many challenges during this project. Especially with the coding. For instance; We needed several forms, bet the coding for forms are very long. I used a site called Formiod, but the forms looked bad, didn’t work, and overall weren’t good. Only recently did I find codes that worked for the website, and they look amazing! Another challenge we faced was our images. As I said before, we created a logo that we wanted on the website. Sadly

, the logo wouldn’t show up no matter what I did to the code. 5 days of agonizing over it, we discovered that our school had a master website builder, and we went to him. He explained that we needed a separate folder for images, and BOOM, our problem was fixed. We faced many challenges like this, and all of them caused day’s worth of headaches, tears, and the feeling like “Maybe I should throw this keyboard across the room!”

Although all of that happened, we’re both so excited that our website is off the ground, and that we’ll be able to help a lot of kids that are like we were. We both grew up in underfunded schools, and we understand how hard that can be. I can’t wait to see how much this will help those schools.

These 6 weeks we weren’t asked to pick a module, or come up with something innovative to create. Instead we had to make a skateboard. At first it sounded fun, not really easy to make but I knew that somehow we were going to make a skateboard. I was excited because with the money we got from selling the skateboards we were going to give back to the makerspace by donating a tool. Later we would find out that we we’re going to have a lot of struggles, but it wasn’t impossible.

 Building

My groups first challenge was to build. I had to read definitions about different terms used to describe a skateboard. My group decided to make a penny board. We had problems using Illustrator, but after our 3rd try we finally got the shape of our skateboard. We lasered cut a piece of paper (our prototype) and it  turned out good. Then we started to laser cut our veneer. Most of the layers were even but there was some that weren’t even. We couldn’t redo those layers so we had to use them, that was our first failure. Even though it was hard we still got through it, and we solved it.

We tried to make our board the best we could. The glueing process was easy, we just had to let the skateboard dry. After that we had to drill mounting holes, this part was easy too. After we did all of that we had to sand our skateboard to make it completely even.  I think that the building part was the one we struggled the most with.

Design

Each one of us brainstormed 3 different types of designs, and when we were done, we shared our drawings. I was stuck so I checked on Pinterest, there was a lot of cool ideas that I choosed from. We ended up picking the splattered paint design. the colors we picked were white, blue, purple, and black. We painted the back of the skateboard white and then we splattered the other colors. After all the paint dried we had to add a thin layer of polyurethane as a protective layer. This step was easy and didn’t take much time.

At the beginning of this year I thought that this class was just to see what pathway we wanted to pick next year. I didn’t really understand the purpose because I already knew what pathway I wanted to be in. And I consider myself not good at making stuff, so at first I didn’t understand the class at all. Now that I’m done with all the projects, I’ve realized that this class is more than what pathway we want to pick. It was thought me that no matter how bad something turns out, you can persevere and make it better. Some modules made me want to give up but I never did, I just kept trying,

           

Blog Post

 

Well to bad this is my very last time that I get to write a blog post, Today I would like to talk about how this class is very hard and that it is not easy to do somethings in this class me and my group made zee blank dolls which are very unique to me because I never heard of anything like this before.

The way we got started on this project was when  my teacher assigned us to make a project for the maker fair and we didn’t know what to do so my teacher help us come up with some ideas because we were all confused, then she thought about a project that could help our art teacher because he was doing something that had to go along with it.

 

3D printing which is a process of printing layers of filament that create your design and make it in real life 3D. During this  project we have a few failures and that was when we was working on printing our doll and the reason why our 3d printer extruder keep getting stuck was because it was jammed by the filament that we use because the extruder was off track.

 

The 3D printer is not that hard to use once you get the hang of using it or know how to use it. basicly all you have to do is load the filament then push start  and watch it began designing your design.

Blog Post

 

Well to bad this is my very last time that I get to write a blog post, Today I would like to talk about how this class is very hard and that it is not easy to do somethings in this class me and my group made zee blank dolls which are very unique to me because I never heard of anything like this before.

The way we got started on this project was when  my teacher assigned us to make a project for the maker fair and we didn’t know what to do so my teacher help us come up with some ideas because we were all confused, then she thought about a project that could help our art teacher because he was doing something that had to go along with it.

 

3D printing which is a process of printing layers of filament that create your design and make it in real life 3D. During this  project we have a few failures and that was when we was working on printing our doll and the reason why our 3d printer extruder keep getting stuck was because it was jammed by the filament that we use because the extruder was off track.

 

The 3D printer is not that hard to use once you get the hang of using it or know how to use it. basicly all you have to do is load the filament then push start  and watch it began designing your design.

Blog Post

 

Well to bad this is my very last time that I get to write a blog post, Today I would like to talk about how this class is very hard and that it is not easy to do somethings in this class me and my group made zee blank dolls which are very unique to me because I never heard of anything like this before.

The way we got started on this project was when  my teacher assigned us to make a project for the maker fair and we didn’t know what to do so my teacher help us come up with some ideas because we were all confused, then she thought about a project that could help our art teacher because he was doing something that had to go along with it.

 

3D printing which is a process of printing layers of filament that create your design and make it in real life 3D. During this  project we have a few failures and that was when we was working on printing our doll and the reason why our 3d printer extruder keep getting stuck was because it was jammed by the filament that we use because the extruder was off track.

 

The 3D printer is not that hard to use once you get the hang of using it or know how to use it. basicly all you have to do is load the filament then push start  and watch it began designing your design.

Raymya Hardeman

The Year of Memories

This 8th grade year was the year of reflection and extreme improvement for me. This was the year where I learned how to better handle situations where I am under stress or pressure and also the year where I learned to better control my anger and re-think situations.

 

For this project some of the time I actually thought about giving up because even though I’m not a quitter I was raised to be resilient and tackle any challenges that come my way. I’ve always had that strong independent mentality so sometimes it was difficult because usually I don’t do well in groups sometimes this project helped me better communicate with team members, and not be so angry with them for certain things. Even though sometimes it was difficult because at times we couldn’t and didn’t communicate the best way at times we always tried to find a way.

 

This project really does capture the essence of not giving up and it showed me that whether you fail or not you can never give up you have to keep on trying harder and harder. The key to achieving is believing.We can’t help that we’re going to mess up in life, we can’t stop ourselves from falling, we can only get back up and try our hardest to succeed and we can never give up. Once you have a quitter mentality it’s hard to come back from it, but if you have a winner mentality you will win/succeed majority of the time.

This is sadly going to be my last blog post. I would like to tell you about one of the challenging times in this class. Our current project is about a failure so I am here to tell you about one of mine.

So one of my failures was when I was working in a group with Araveea, Jazlyn, and Clarisa. For our maker project we made zee dolls. So we made one doll and it worked perfectly. Once we tried to make another one but the machine was always messing up. It was like we were making no progress. But we didn’t give up.

It got pretty annoying that it would always mess up. Like we would get half way through the doll and it would mess up. It got super discouraging. We just kept trying and then we eventually had two dolls. At the end we had nine dolls! We were so happy that it finally did what it was supposed to do the whole time.

Sometimes you just need to stick with something even if it keeps messing up. Don’t get discouraged because it will probably work out in the end. It is ok to fail, failing is a party of life. Sometimes like in our situation you have to fail to succeed, the key is not to give up.

Hello all! This is sadly going to be my last blog post. But, I would like to tell everyone about one of the most challenging times in this class, because our current project is about failure. So, here I am, to tell you all about failure.

One of the most challenging times in this class was when my group, Claudia, Maite, Georgia, and Emi, was making our LED light up shirts and we had stitched on the ground and we stopped there. We had no idea what we were doing. We were all just following Georgia’s steps because she had prior experience with sewing while we had none.

So we were all sewing on the lights, all the blues, all the reds, and all the greens. We didn’t think not once, to test out our code on what we had stitched so far. This was our biggest down fall. So I thought I would test out my shirt and see if it worked after I had already sewn on all the lights and everything was connected.

I went to the computer, plugged in the Lilypad to the computer and sent the program through. I will admit, I was very disappointed when I saw it only lit up red when all the legs were sewn down. I was angry and just told the group that mine was only red so we tested theirs, and theirs didn’t light up at all. But it was all okay because we had something. We had gotten somewhere from absolutely nothing. There was never a day when we didn’t make any progress.

So, at the end of the day, when you fail, its okay. You will be okay, everything will be okay. Because you’re never going to have to start from square one. Even if everything is ruined, you still have the knowledge on how to start it all again. You still have something, so don’t worry. You have to have the Skateboarder’s Mentality. :~)

I remember clearly the first module we did in our PLTW class, we were building speakers out of simple materials, (plastic cups, plates, paper, aluminium foil, etc) for our counselor so her phone sound could be louder and we were still kind of confused on what a module was, so we also kind of had to figure that out and start thinking about designing, and building our speaker.

We each brainstormed for a few minutes, I tried to design the most unconventional designs while keeping in mind it had to work. After we all had ideas of a possible design we talked about them and make a matrix ( an organizer, where you critique all ideas). It didn’t have to be so elaborate, just something that got the job done, so my group though small and efficient. We even thought of just using the cup and cutting out the bottom (Idea 1). Now, this would work but it wouldn’t be the the most amplified speaker. So we went back to each of our ideas. (Idea 2)-Make a box to put the phone in, this would not work because it didn’t help amplify the sound of the phone. (Idea 3)- Create an actual speaker (one with wires and all the tech stuff), this would have been great but we were in a time constraint. (Idea 4)- Create a cone type/shape thing, we saw that this was our best option and went with it.

At the end it was great because it worked! After many trials and fails we finally got a design that was manageable and pretty good. I personally felt very happy that we didn’t give up and made something simple and boring like cutting the bottom of a cup and calling that an amplifier.

This six weeks, we were asked to build a skateboard, without the wheels. We  went  through 3 different steps, build, design, and reflect. Different groups started their skateboard at different steps in the design process, so there wouldn’t be 50 groups working on the laser cutter, causing problems.

My group started with building. First, we designed a design on Adobe Illustrator. We used the pencil tool and traced our outline. Once we traced it, we changed the line thickness to “.1”. We also changed the color of the line to blue. Then we saved the file to a flash drive. We plugged the flash drive into the laser cutter and printed the design on about 7 layers of wood. After cutting we glued the wood together and clamped the wood together. We then let it dry.

After letting the wood dry, we went on to our next step, design. My group and I went on the internet and looked up many skateboard designs. After a long time of discussing, we settled on doing a galaxy themed skateboard. We came up with this idea by just testing out all of the paints and spray paints. We tested out our design on scrap pieces of wood with different types of spray paint. Once we made the design to our liking, we started painting on our actual skateboard. We painted the base of the board black. Once it dried we spray painted on the top of the skateboard with multiple types of spray paint. To finish it off, we splattered the board with white paint. We had finally finished our board. I was really proud after finishing the board. I felt like it was to the best of our abilities. I also felt like everything we had learned this year was put into this board.

The final part of the project was to reflect. To reflect we had to write a blog post. This blog post is my reflection. Overall, I really enjoyed this project. I never thought I could actually make a skateboard. I thought it would be a lot harder than it actually was. This project was fun and united me with my group members.

This project was a pretty good way to end the 8th grade year in my PLTW class. This project taught my team teamwork and communication. A team cannot function without those 2 specific skills. These skills can be used everywhere in the real world. In the real world, you have to talk to people, so no matter what you will always have to interact with others. The 2 skills we learned will help me in the future.

Me and my group members have been working on our playhouse for the past few months. Its not been easy on us either we had lots and lots of challenges while trying to complete this project. Our goal was to build this playhouse and donate to an elementary for the children to enjoy. It has been a long process but we are almost complete.  We are finally finished with all of the building and we are going to start to paint today. It was a great experience for me working with my fellow classmates and seeing our project come together was amazing. I hope when we do donate it that the kids appreciate it and enjoy it because we worked long and hard on it. I loved this project and hope to do something like this in the near future.