Summer is over, school is starting back up again, and, wait, I’m in grade 11? What? How? I still feel like I’m in grade 9 at most! Where did all the time go?
Anyway, we’re starting this school year of with a BANG! Literally. Our first project this year is about The Manhattan Project, a top-secret program during WWII that created two atomic bombs that the U.S. army used against Japan in August 1945. The final product of this project will be an animated video about a chosen topic related to the atomic bombs, but that is for the blog post at the end of this project which you can see here. This post, however, is about what I already know on this topic, and what I hope to learn along the way.
This is going to be a very long project, compared to normal, spanning 29 classes, and over a month, so there will be a lot of information to remember. Instead of trying to remember everything, I am creating a ‘second brain’ to remember it all for me, in a format called a Zettelkasten. A Zettelkasten is a note networking and filing system created by Niklas Luhmann, and it uses 3 types of notes: Fleeting notes, literature notes, and permanent notes.
To keep track of the material I’m learning, I will write a fleeting note whenever I hear or see anything that catches my attention. It could be a couple words, or a sentence or two. As I research, read or watch anything, I will write a literature note to keep information from that source together. Of the types of note, literature notes usually contain the most information, and the least opinions. Every few days, I will go through my fleeting notes and literature notes, and turn them into permanent notes. Permanent notes are my opinions or thoughts on a topic, and should only be about 1 sentence long. Here is an example of the first literature note I made this year:
Before the start of this project, I knew very little about The Manhattan Project. I knew that it was a U.S. based project that involved creating bombs. In the last few days, I’ve already learned that it was between 1942 and 1945, and it produced 2 atomic bombs, called Little Boy and Fat Man, that were both used against Japan in August 1945.
During this project, I hope to learn about some of the science behind how the bombs work, the outcome and consequences that came from dropping the bombs, the ethics behind using science in war, and why this project happened in the first place. In addition to materials I receive in class, I plan to research these topics through multiple sources online and on YouTube. I am looking forward to learning more about these scientific breakthroughs.