Gavin

"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein

Reading Reflection Blog Post

I have read 3 books so far, and am in the process of finishing my 4th. They include the Six of Crows duology “Six of Crows”, and “Crooked Kingdom”, as well as “A Little Life”.

  • Although I like the Six of Crows plot more, “A Little Life” has had a far bigger impact on me as the story involves a lot of emotional, physical, and psychological suffering, and really hits me hard (I almost cried for Jude)

Prop Design Reflection

Over the 3 weeks of us designing props for the middle school play “Once Upon a Hutong” in stagecraft,  I’ve been working on the controller (See image below).

To create the design, Gene and I first found inspiration online for controllers that we thought would look good on set (figure 1), and Mr. Walton came up with the idea to put the actor through the controller so that they could use both hands to move the joystick and press buttons. With these in mind, I drew this model (figure 2). For the square inside the box, I based it off of myself, since it would have been better for it to be too big than too small. As for “feedback”, Ms. Northcott gave us restrictions that we didn’t know of at the start, so the color scheme and the shape of the controller needed to change. We ended with the new design (figure 3).

The major problem in the creation process was still the design since we had already started working on the original design like the antenna had already been finished by Maggie and James, so that set even more restrictions to the design. Another problem, although smaller, was that the laser cutter that we were using to cut the cardboard was malfunctioning, and kept burning the cardboard. We were still able to use it, but if you open up our controller, the insides would be black and crispy.

I didn’t learn a lot of major breakthrough ideas, just some things to use or look out for. For example, makercase.com is a great website, the only way to change the color of straps is to dye them (we didn’t) and to always check with the director on details so that precious time isn’t wasted on designs that won’t be used. Also, styrofoam balls don’t go well with spray paint.

The controller can do most of the basic needs that a model controller needs to be able to do, and we purposely didn’t glue down the joystick so that there’s at least a little mobility to show direction. The strap (as said above) wasn’t really the correct color, so we just hope that no one in the audience will notice a strap of blue across the golden robe.

Mexican Revolution Common-Craft Video in Plain English


Welcome to the Mexican Revolution! It lasted from 1910 to 1920 during a period of chaos, when Mexico underwent 5 different presidents. They were Porfirio Diaz, who ruled for 35 years, and was the main reason the revolution started, Francisco I. Madero, who overthrew Diaz in 1911 after the Battle of Juarez. Victoriano Huerta, who ordered the overthrowing and killing of Madero in 1913, Venustiano Carranza, who led the charge against Huerta in 1914, along with the drafting of the Constitution of 1917, and Alvaro Obregon, who finally ended the Revolution with him and Francisco Villa signing a peace treaty. Speaking of Villa, him and Emiliano Zapata played a consistent role across the entire revolution, often being the ones that were discontent with the new president and starting a new uprising.

Literary Non-Fiction: Reader’s Notebook On “The Borden Murders”

The Borden Murders by Sarah Miller is a literary non-fiction book with many facts that appear here and there that adds to the story, which follows Lizzie Borden as she becomes the main suspect of committing the homicide that saw her step-mother and father, Abby and Andrew Borden, brutally murdered. This leads into the trail of Lizzie Borden, also known as the “Trail of the Century”. This book will bring you through the beginning, when the crime was committed, through events full of detail, and all the way up until as the final verdict was given, along with the aftermaths of the incident.

I really liked this book, as as you scroll down, you will see what I think are the main themes and central ideas that the author was trying to convey. (Also, I needed to combine pages so the photos might be a little scuffed, I hope you don’t mind)

The most important message that the author is trying to tell is that society expect women to dress and act in a certain way (acting weak, needs someone’s saving, helpless).

Here, I have the cause and effect chart, along with the connections section. These 2 points are connected because it shows the flow of the story and one of the main themes, Sexism. This talks about how women had to change for social events, and needed to act weak or faint when under pressure.

Next, with this diagram, I show the 3 main issues of the book, SexismClassism, and Racism. This diagram also talks about the narrative and informational points that come up from the book.

Finally, the last page are definitions and examples of each of the main text types that we learned for literary non-fiction. It explores how each one can be found or used, with ones that I have looked into from my book.

Moxie Book Talk

Link to book talk (Loom)

Vivian is a high-school girl living in a small-town Texas. She faces many negative stereotypes, sexism, and problems with boy and girl friends alike. Take a deeper dive into this novel in this book-talk to learn more about the life and challenges of Vivian, along with the beliefs of the award winning author, Jennifer Mathieu, through the theme of this story which we will explore…

Found Poem – Lamb to the Slaughter

 

The found poem was made with the words form the short story “Lamb to the Slaughter” written by Roald Dahl. The conflict of this story is Character vs Character (External conflict). The main character, Mary Maloney deals with her husband leaving her because of his job. Also, Mary is already pregnant, so she wants to have two supporting parents for that kid. Her husband keeps on wanting to leave so as a last resort, Mary takes the lamb leg that she was about to cook and whacks him in the head. My poem shows this conflict by adding the part where the husband says, “I’m going out”. My design connects with this poem by adding the lamb leg, a major part of the poem, and the scull, symbolling the dead husband. The setting is also in the kitchen, so I made that the background.

LEGO Master Builder Enrichment Design: Amusement Park (Using ISB LEGO)

Link to video on Dragon’s Tube: Link to Dragon’s Tube

LEGO Master Builder Enrichment Design: Car (Using ISB LEGO)

 

Plan:

I think that my plan has improved since the last project – LEGO Master Builder Enrichment Design: House (Using LEGO Architecture) – because now it’s WAY more detailed, and unlike the other plan, I am actually proud of this. It’s shows a lot of the key features I wanted to add, and had different points of view so that I could easily copy what I have on paper, into LEGOs.

Model:

 

Strengths:

  1. The flip-open door I made looks ok, and it work very well.
  2. I made a lot of inside things/furniture to decorate the interior of the car.

Improvements:

  1. The flip-open door is a little unstable, because it’s so heavy. If I had some specific Lego I probably would have been able to strengthen  it more so that it won’t break so often.
  2. The colors of the car are a little weird, but because I didn’t have a lot of time to sort the Legos, I wasn’t able to sort them by color. Also my containers were kind of small, so it was hard for me to find what I needed. This caused me to have a mixed color car, and it doesn’t look as good if I could choose the colors I put in it.

LEGO Master Builder Enrichment Design: House (Using LEGO Architecture)

PLAN:

I really disliked my plan, because it wasn’t as detailed as most of the plans I make for other classes. But doing this actually helped me in my “creating the model” part because it wasn’t perscise, so that I had more room to add extra things I wanted, and not need to update the plan every class.

MODEL:

Strengths:
  1. There is a balcony where people who live in the house can observe the outside.
  2. The house contains many different aspects for furniture and other details.
Improvements:
  1. If I had more bricks, then i would finish the roof and add a campfire in the middle of the 4 benches .
  2. I would make a doorway from the balcony to the inside of the house, where I could place a door.

The other little things (back of photo) were some fun “structures”/”objects” I wanted to make while making my house, as sort of a break. These also included JoeBob the Pterodactyl (I had to search that up) in its “natural habitat”.

Argumentative Essay Reflection

  1. I think I had a pretty good article name, as before, all I could think of for informational writings, or any writing in fact, was “Plastic Bans Aren’t Good” or “New Year’s Dinner!” REALLY CREATIVE NAMES...
  2. I think something I could improve on next time is that I should type my viewpoint into Google and see how many results pop up so I can change my viewpoint or main topic before I start to rethink my life choices after I’m halfway through writing my article.
  3. I mostly understand Ms. Rivera’s grades after I looked at them and matched them with my article, so I don’t have any thoughts on them. My grade for myself has some parts to it that probably could have been similar to Ms. Rivera’s if I had spent more time reading and match the article with the options.
  4. One problem I had was that my viewpoint for the topic I used was not one that the school resources and a lot of the other sources agreed with, so I had a hard time trying to find articles that i could pull information from. This is the reason why i had very little evidence in the body paragraphs. I partly overcome this obstacle by rephrasing my question from a direct “plastic ban is bad” to a “is a plastic ban good or bad” so that some articles with those types of titles would pop up. This is also how I came up with my title, asking a question instead of saying it directly.
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