Monthly Archives: April 2022

[Insert Witty DI Title Here]

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Hey guys! Welcome back to my blog. Today I’m going to be talking about Destination Imagination! I had the scientific challenge, which was called Up Close.

My team included Caden, Kadin, Owen, Jackson, and Naomi.

The Up Close challenge required quite a few things, but mainly for there to be a story in which character(s) go into a microworld and discover a mysterious object, and later learning what it is (this is a rough explanation.)

In my team (Bacterial Besties)’s solution, we had 2 scientists fall into the microworld and meet our three bacteria, who’s names were Sal, Mon, and Ella (to be salmonella.) The scientists met the bacteriophage, figured out what it was, and used it to kill the bacteria, before leaving the microworld.

When we started working on ideas, we had pretty much nothing. We had barely any ideas, only that we would have scientists fall into the microworld through a microscope. As we continued to work on it, we began to come up with more ideas, such as the bacteriophage and it having moving legs. Eventually, we had a full plan and began to write the script. Once we had a pretty good script, we started building things, such as the microscope. When we went to Loon Lake, we finalized the script, and when we got back, we built the backdrop. As we put together our costumes and started rehearsing with our backdrop, it fell apart, so we rebuilt it, and our entire presentation was already looking much better than before. Eventually, we memorized lines and went to St. George’s to present our solution.

I think our presentation went okay, though I think we could’ve improved by delivering our lines more smoothly. It seemed a bit too awkward, and we weren’t in sync. We also would’ve done better if we started building the bacteriophage costume earlier on. Because we built it so last minute, it was almost falling apart while we were presenting, and it wasn’t fully functional. I think if we had also put more effort into it, we definitely would’ve done better.

One thing I think we did really well was our backdrop. When it broke the first time, we were sad, but we went back at it with a proper plan, and it turned out so much better. We also did pretty good with the backdrop transition while presenting, doing it smoothly and efficiently without and bumps of hitches. I also think we did pretty well on our instant challenge.

There was also a photo we had to take of our car decorated by our team! This was ours:

The big sign that says “bacterial besties” was our team sign.

And finally, here’s a video of our presentation:

Thank you for reading my blog post. DI really pushed me out of my comfort zone, but it was totally worth it because of all the ways I grew along the way.

Chemistry Coding!

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Hey guys, welcome back to my blog! Today I’ll be talking about my most recent Scimatics project, Chemistry Coding. This project was really interesting to me, because I already know my way around coding with Scratch, and thoroughly enjoy it.

 

At the start of the project, as per usual, we made a Mindnode, which we completed at the end of the project. Here’s mine:

Here are my core competencies:

Questioning and predicting: Demonstrate a sustained curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest.

I think I did well on this competency. I demonstrated it by going deeper in my Scratch game, by adding things like Scratch plugins, allowing my game to involve different concepts outside of simple buttons and clickers. Another way I showed this competency was in the assignment where we drew diagrams of molecules/atoms, where I put effort into my drawings and researched the information I needed.

Scientific Communication: Communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies.

I think I did really well in this competency. One piece of evidence of this is the “What is this?” page on my Scratch project, which used scientific language to explain a few simple concepts that were included in my game.

Reasoning and Analyzing: Use logic and patterns to solve puzzles and play games.

I think I decently extended on this competency. My reasoning for this is that I added the Scratch plugin and included motion sensing on my game, and went far deeper on the coding aspect of this project than was necessary. You can see evidence of this in my actual game, which is embedded in this blog post.

 

Thanks for reading!