Over the past few weeks we started to continue our learning about the Cold War, since our last project focused on how the Cold War began this project was focused on how the fear of nuclear weapons played into history. Since we had lots of past information and opinions I was excited to expand on topics that I wasn’t able to focus on in the past project. We began by learning about some more specific parts of history that included the Iron curtain, Soviet influence and American influence, all of this revolved mainly around the Iron curtain.

We listened to lectures that gave us more information about how the US was trying to stop countries in Europe from joining communism by flying in supplies and recources. The more we learnt the more ideas I got because we knew that our final product was up to us to choose our topic and considering how many events happened because of the Cold War it’s almost overwhelming. I ended up choosing the space race as my topic because of how the creation of ICBMs led to Space exploration, even though our final product was canceled I did learn about specifics on the topic on my own time. While we learnt about the fallout from the Cold War we read a book called Fallout by Todd Strasser, this book is about a family that is trapped inside their fallout shelter with their neighbours, the book is mostly about how morals and principles change when put in a scenario like being trapped in a bunker with limited recourses.

Even though this is technically a kids book I was hooked on to the story just because of my notes about the same topic, this book was crucial to my understanding since it was a perfect analogy to the fallout of the Cold War, not directly but I could use the book to match similarities in human behaviour which is how I was able to write my final response which was our final product for this project.  We also did these Socratic seminars which are basically just a group discussion, these seminars were very helpful because we got to show our learning to the class in a less nerve racking way.

My first Socratic seminar I was able to contribute to the conversation but only a limited amount of times, on the second one I was not able to connect what I had prepared very well so I couldn’t contribute that much, I did however learn a lot from my classmates which helped me compose my final response. I think that I learnt a lot more in this project than the last just because of the fact that we were expanding our past learning which allows me to connect new work to old work, this is a project that I will be able to use in the future for and I am glad that we got to do it this early.