As I look back on the 8th grade, I look at the things I have learned and all of the things I want to do and learn before the year is over.

 

The projects and the activities that we have done throughout the year have been really fun and the teachers have tried their best to make this a fun year, and I think they have done a pretty good job. They also have to prepare us for the 9th grade and I think we have all of the skills that we will need for the next grade and we will also be able to exceed the goals that we are striving for with those skills.That is what I like about what the teachers have been doing for us.

 

When I look at my year in PLTW, I think about how fun the projects were and our chance of independence because we had a chance to work without much instruction and we had to see what it would be like to work in a type of workshop

and maybe in a real world place. This also taught us how to use power tools and to Do It Yourself (DIY).

In PLTW we have learned many things throughout the course of the year and one of those things was to never accept  failure and I have had a hard time doing that at some points and this was how. Because I don’t like much criticism I have always had an even harder time dealing with taking control of when I needed to fix things with projects and not wanting to quit when I did something wrong but my teacher Mrs. Sauter and my partners in my group made me realize why I should try to fix the problem rather than quit completely and I have done this a lot within the year and I have all of these people to help me to help me push on and finish the task at hand.

To be honest, 8th grade was my best year in school yet, because the teachers are fun and the classes are fun, we learn a lot of new things and there are so many great opportunities.

-Calvinesha H.

Prosthetics help people who have certain disabilities like not having an arm or leg due to an accident that occurred in their past time. They seem like they are a great objects that help many people and they are but they sure aren’t the easiest to make.

There is certain things a prosthetic body part has to consist of and some of those components are comfort, durability, and style. Ultimately all comes down to the client you are producing the prosthetic for because it is gonna be in their body for however long they want it and they are gonna want to customize what they are gonna have on their body for the rest of their lives.  That being, you are also gonna want to start considering that if this object is gonna be on their body they are gonna need comfort because not many people want a piece of metal or wood on their leg or arm without some type of cushion to comfort them.

When it came to actually building the prosthetic leg it became a huge challenge to my group and I because we planned just about every detail out but when we started gathering our materials and we soon realized that they didn’t meet our expectations that we had planned out before. So, we had to make do with what we had.

We got the base for the leg and things were going great even though we had to make some changes. We spray painted the first layer of paint and it was really good but a bit faint so we waited for the paint to dry and paint again. The second time came around and that is when everything went wrong. the paint ended turning very sloppy and splotchy. We worked through it and started to make the foot and we tried wood out and it seem to work but it didn’t bend or was even flexible to we had to forget the wood and move to cardboard. It met all the requirements we had in mind so we spray painted it to make it official, and of course something goes wrong, the cardboard got really soggy and couldn’t hold up much weight but it still worked.

Lastly we had to attach the comfort and luckily everything worked out with that part. Next was the attachment to the leg and that took a bit of thinking because we could have it permanently attached to the leg and couldn’t have it not attached at all to we tried many things and we finally came up with a solution, rope. We tied it around the leg and I worked!

Through many of the failures we finally were able to make the prosthetic leg work!

I’ve never heard of a person that has never failed at something; and if there has been, please feel free to call me wrong. Until then, I’m going to continue thinking that no one is perfect. When I think about the word “trying” or “new” I think of a saying my dad used to say, “Where there is a ditch, there is a hill.” I never really understood what he meant because I thought about it too literal. I guess that’s how everyone tries to look at sayings when they don’t understand it. I didn’t think about too much after he told me because I didn’t want to overwhelm myself. Now, I regret not thinking about it because maybe if I did, I wouldn’t have given up on so many opportunities.

Growing up, I was taught many lessons from my family. My family always told me that these lessons were important and valuable; that they would help me later in life. What they didn’t know was that just because they taught me them, didn’t mean I understood it. Half the things they tried teaching me didn’t really stick. In my opinion, that’s what happens when you don’t try to understand. I went through many challenges in my life and I got over them easily, but one challenge will stick with me for a long time.

I was 12 years old when my parents finally decided to put me in swimming classes. I went to countless birthday parties where I sat at the edge of the pool with my feet swinging in the water, while the other kids swam around. So you can imagine how excited I was when they told me the news. 1st day of classes and I was gleaming with pure excitement and happiness. I got to the pool ready to get this started, until I saw my teacher. Looking back she wasn’t scary whatsoever, but to my 12 years old self, she was terrifying. Part of my brain knew she was just a lady, but the other part thought she was the wicked witch of the west. I shook those thoughts out of my brain and got into the water.

I was halfway through the class and I already knew I wanted to quit and never come back. During my break, I sat at the bench with my dad and drank enough water to fill another pool. I had a pout on my face, a scratch on my arm and boogers running down my face; worst combination ever. My dad must have realized that I was having a bad session because he asked me why I was so mad. I just told him that I wasn’t having fun and I wanted to go home already. I guess that wasn’t what he wanted to hear because he looked at me with a hard glare. He told me that I thought learning how to swim was going to be easy and that I was surprised to find it was not. In my head I knew he was right, so when my break was over, I knew I had to continue. I got back in the water ready to end this practice in a good note; and that’s exactly what I did.

Karla Ru

By Helen Foster

Throughout our lives, we will all experience failure one way or another. It doesn’t matter if you’re 3 or 33, things can always go wrong and, according to Murphy’s Law, they will. Now, I could go on and on about how failure is inevitable and there is no escape from death and life is meaningless, but where’s the fun in that? The truth is that failure is not always a bad thing and you shouldn’t treat it so. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

I think we can all agree that our maker projects were not the easiest in the world. Some stressed more than others, but it still was a lot of work. When Lauren, Dhivya, Sammie and I originally sat down and decided we were making a dollhouse, we never predicted it would be so hard and time consuming. We even had to add another team member, Izzy, because we couldn’t do it all ourselves. We were so caught up in what we thought we should be doing that, it turned out we were doing everything wrong. We had cut our wood incorrectly and needed to begin over again, which put us very far behind. It seems like this would be a horrible catastrophe for us, but as it turns out it actually helped us because we all now know how to properly create corners. Yay for failure!

There was another point in our project where Izzy and I went on Nepris with a woman who makes dollhouses for a living and it turned out we had not even made the right structure for a proper dollhouse but we had already started over once so we didn’t have time to redo everything again and waste materials. We had failed, but we flipped it around and took it as a lesson to always master your craft before trying to make a masterpiece.

We can probably all agree that we generally do not like to fail or do something wrong, but we have to put aside our differences and realize that failure is not something to be ashamed about or shamed for. Instead of feeling bad for ourselves, we should be celebrating our chances to improve and grow as people. We’re always going to fail, so why not make the best out of it?

Every time you try something new, the chances that what you do is completely correct are not very likely. Often times, you fail because you aren’t going to understand everything the first time. Failure is something that is hard for some people to accept, because it makes them think that what they did was a waste or that they will never be able to finish the task that they had attempted to start . What people normally don’t think of when they fail at something is the fact that they know what they need to work on and that it’s okay if you don’t get something the first time you try.

For my example of a failure, it has to do with my makerfaire project, bird clothes. My group members and I had decided to create a closet as a storage for the bird clothes we made. When designing in our notebooks, we didn’t take account of how we were going to make some of the pieces. Once we started cutting the pieces of wood using the miter saw, we realized that what we were planning wouldn’t actually work.

We had to brainstorm to figure out what to do next. We plugged in the numbers on a website in order to laser cut our pieces for the closet that  would create a perfect rectangle. We were okay with knowing that our first try wasn’t going to work. None of us had made a miniature closet before and I think that it was a good practice and on the bright side, at least it was on a project that we had the time to start over so next time we would be prepared.

The next problem we faced, were  the supporting pieces for the inside structure of the closet We had struggled with this part for a bit but we didn’t give
up on trying to figure out how to correctly cut it.

In the end, we created a cute bird closet and we didn’t let our first few failures demotivate us and make us give up and change the plan. Sure, my situation  was a little discouraging and in some cases you may actually need to create a new plan and that’s okay too.

-Nicole R

The final product was fine. It works well, it’s not superb, but it does the job. It launches things to a sufficient distance. Sure.

 

The design looks simple. It must have been easy to make.

 

Not.

 

The triangles that held up the structure and gave it order were the mountains. They were nearing the top. Just a little bit more to the finish line…we only needed to glue the last piece, the cup on the arm where the tennis ball would go.

 

But everything came down… One part snapped off on one of the ends of the triangles.

 

That was when I felt failure. We fell down really far. It would be difficult to climb back to the top of the mountain or to finish the project.

 

On that Saturday’s workshop, I screamed in the hallways. It was really ironic considering we spent like four hours on it and we were back to square one.

 

We basically had to restart the assembling process. It made me super frustrated and worried. ‘Can we do it?’

 

Like Bob the Builder says, ‘We can!’, we can do it.

Our group spent extra time during lunch and advisory going to the Makerspace and worked on it ’til it was all done. We fixed the triangle’s leg and painted our new base (the old one got ruined). After everything dried we put it together.

All our stress! Gone! Perseverance makes for awesome results and keeps you alive. We didn’t die from that epic fall that would have defeated us if we had given up!

 

Those obstacles, those mountains we had to climb may have not been as tall as Mt. Everest, but I’m proud of myself and my team for overcoming them.

Failure comes with almost everything we do. The idea of getting something right the first time is nice to think about, but isn’t always the end result. Whether it be a big project, a grade on an assignment, or something bigger. Something I like to think about whenever I catch myself in this type of problem is the saying- “There is no success like failure.” It makes me realize that failing is okay, and it happens more times than we succeed. If you think about a situation that had a difficult process, but an easy or fast outcome, you question yourself. There’s always room to improve, no matter the situation.

I have failed many times in many areas of my life. One situation that stuck out to me the most, happened more recently. In my class PLTW (Project Lead The Way), I was given the challenge of creating anything I wanted within the makerspace given to our school. My group and I thought of a silly idea, and this idea was to create bird clothes. We all laughed at the thought of an animal wearing clothes, especially a tiny bird. But, our teacher convinced us to go through with it. At first, the making of the clothes was extremely difficult. Thats where the failure kicked in. Learning how to sew was very frustrating and difficult for me. So, when I was making the clothes I kept on messing up and having to start over. Thankfully, with direction and help from my group members I finally learned from my mistakes and did the task correctly.

Failure is so essential to everything. The whole point of making a mistake is learning from it and using it in the future. Next time when you fail, get back up, and learn from it.

Tori Baltierra
8th period

By: Bonnie J.

In PLTW, we have completed many projects throughout this year. Last six weeks, my partner and I worked on a project for the Make-O-Rama. I wrote about completing this project for my last blog post. For this blog post, I am going to be writing about how even though the project did not work out as we had hoped, it was not necessarily a bad thing.

My partner and I made a puzzle box, but it did not turn out anything like we planned. We wanted it to be a fun interactive challenge anyone could do. To make the puzzle, we used the laser cutter to get precise pieces. Once we had cut out all of the pieces and glued them together, we decided we wanted to make it more unique and paint it. Additional to painting our puzzle box, my partner and I wanted to use the laser engraver to engrave a design onto each of the side pieces. We wanted to paint our box black and have the engraved design white or vice versa, but there was no black paint or enough of the white paint to use. So my partner and I agreed to paint the box green, using a thin layer of paint.

After we had already painted the whole box, somebody actually had some white paint. Since our layer of green paint was thin we thought that it would not cause any problems to just repaint using the white paint. We repainted the box and thought that it looked really good. But, then when we tried to put the box together, we found out that the white paint was too thick and made it very difficult fit the pieces together. The white paint that we used was acrylic, which is a thicker type of paint that does not come off easily. After we realized this, we tried to fix the problem by using sandpaper to scrape some of the paint off.

Another problem we ran into while building our puzzle box was having to engrave four holes into two pieces of the box where magnets would placed. We tried using the laser engraver, but our measurements kept getting out of place. The engraver did not go deep enough so we had to engrave the pieces multiple times.

The point of this blog post is that failure is not always a bad thing. Failure is bound to happen to everybody some time and we should not take it as a negative thing. Failure is a way you can learn from your mistakes and improve your work. I view failure as a learning experience that can actually help you improve your work ethic in the long run.

The start of the skateboard project. The new project is making a skateboard. The whole idea is that there aren’t many women skateboarders, and that skateboarders fail a lot, but keep getting back up. Women are great at that! We are resilient, especially at this school. We build houses and benches and all of these other things, and when one thing fails, we fix it and keep going.

I am really excited about the designing portion of the project. My brother used to skateboard constantly, and I noticed that when he went to the skate park there weren’t many girls riding skateboards around. I also noticed that in the skateboard shop there was a street deck that had the sign of a woman (like the kind you find on the girls restroom sign) on the bottom of the board. I found that really strange. Why did they have a woman on the board? What was the point of that? When I looked it up, some say that it was because someone had once joked that “they skate like a girl”. I found that really offensive, even though it is a common saying.

After I found out why the group decided that would be the name of their brand, I was thinking it would be funny to make our design called “boy”. You skate like a boy. Like any normal person would, it doesn’t matter what gender. You skate well, thats it. I really like this idea, but I’m not sure if we will do it. It would be fun to see how it would come out. I’m excited to start this project!

There have been a lot of times in my life where I was having difficulties with whatever I was doing. One of those times was when I was working on a module. For this module we had to create three robots, and program them. I had previously been in robotics the last year, so I knew what I was doing most of the time. My group and I had almost no trouble when we were building the actual structure of the robot. That was the easy part, and we breezed though it. But when it came time to program the robot, I was a little over confident. During the whole project I thought that I knew what I was going to do for the programming. I had been the programmer after all in robotics. The thing was I had had guidance the whole time.

I honestly hadn’t picked up as much as I had wanted. Finally the moment had come, and I sat in front of the keyboard. I had pumped myself up for this moment, and now my mind had gone blank. I didn’t even know where to start. It seemed forever that I stared at the letters in front of me. Finally when I thought I had something, I typed it quickly into the computer. Hoping I had had a breakthrough I downloaded it to the motors. Giddy with excitement I pressed go. But nothing. The robot sat there not moving, and I lost hope once again. Racking my brain for any one shred of memory I tried again. With less enthusiasm this time I put what I thought would fix it into the computer, and pressed go. Again nothing. Time was starting to run out, and I was ready to accept defeat. Knowing I wouldn’t be able to figure this out myself, I consulted my trusty friend, Google. About an hour later, and much more frustration, it worked. I pressed go and to my amazement it went. I don’t know why it went, maybe it was my perserverance, or just Google, but it went. Still it didn’t work perfectly, but with time and effort, it went.

This experience really taught me thatI shouldn’t give up. With every problem there is a solution, it just may take longer than planned to find it. That doesn’t mean you should give up though. I didn’t give up, and the robot eventually went.

-Cloa Glass