It’s day 14 of seeing no one except my family, so today I’m writing a quarantine post. Anyhow today’s post is all about Scimatics. Our most recent project was a project called metaphor machines. In this project we built a Rube-Goldberg machine that was a metaphor for the scientific method. My group was anders, ally, and meg. And as you could probably guess our driving question was “How can we represent the scientific method using rube-Goldberg machines?’’ However there were several other competencies in this project, so I’ll jump right into telling you about them.

The first competency was reasoning and Analyzing. This competency was about the final blueprint and making sure it’s done accurately. Unfortunately I didn’t play a very big part in the final blueprints, as I did mostly building and planning, so ally did all of the final blue prints. Although she did it well and accurately when I saw the prints, I didn’t play any role in creating them.

The second competency was questioning and predicting. The competency questioning and predicting is really just about asking questions and paying attention/showing interest in class. I think I did a good job of this in this project. When I was working on the machines I wasn’t distracted and I got a lot done. I was always cutting, gluing, or drawing out where to put the wood. I did a lot of testing of the machine, and fixed plenty of the things that went wrong. The same goes for the lessons, I pay attention and enjoy learning about what we’re learning.

The third competency was planning and conducting. This competency was a lot more to do with the science side of the project. It was to do with our circuit diagrams and our general understanding of circuits. I think I did ok with this part of the project. Although I didn’t do the circuit diagram, I did check the final draft over and it was very well done. I also understood the concept of circuits very well thanks to my obsessive re-reading of the textbook, as I did well on the test.

The last competency was scientific communication. This competency was all about the Machine itself. It was to do with the creation of the machine, the video, and of the narration of the video supporting the scientific method metaphor. I think I did the best in this part of he project by far. I did a ton of the building, cutting, and helped with the design. I also, alongside anders, did a lot of the testing for the machine. As for the video I think we did a good job representing the scientific method, but we definitely could have used more symbols to represent the various methods, just to make it a little bit more clear.

Alrighty folks that’s another post wrapped up, and although I’d love to stay and chat, I really got to be going!

See ya later,

Holly