In this unit, “Our stories make History”, we are creating our own primary sources. We are achieving this goal by recording the experiences, emotions, and thoughts we have during this historical time–the coronavirus outbreak. The projects we’ve done include but are not limited to, writing journals, writing timelines, taking notes from news articles, and creating collages.
This, shown below, is the final project of the unit. As I’ve said, we’ve done many different things in this unit, so in this final project, we are selecting some of them and putting these pieces together.

The elements I selected for this project are a six-word memoir, a collage I made, an emotional timeline(there’s also news articles notes I took), a diary I wrote & a recording of it, pictures of news articles & citations, a screenshot I took(it’s a screenshot of the web page of Baidu), and a song parody I wrote with my friends. I put them in this order for a reason. The six-word memoir is placed on the first page because I think it sums up my experiences during this time, and could kind of lead the reader into the mood(my experiences). The collage, placed after it, then gives a further visual information/explanation of the memoir and my experience.  After that, the timeline and the journal that’s placed on the third and fourth page, could both provide a more detailed and textual version of my experiences. Finally, the rest of the elements are kind of the additional details that are placed in the order of the time I created them.

This primary source could be useful to a historian because I included/provided firsthand descriptions, information, and evidence about this event, which is the coronavirus outbreak, in it.

The thing that went well for me in this unit is that I’m able to finish the projects on time. I am also proud of my journal since I kind of did a good job of keeping this routine every day.
However there are also a few challenges for me in this unit. The major one is that I had some trouble with recording down my thoughts and emotions on my timeline and my journal. This because I was trapped at home, due to the virus, so there’s really not much key moments for me. Yet, at the end, I solved this problem by writing the more daily events and thoughts.

This is my group’s (I Design Knowledge) mug insulator, we named it Scissoreines. The main function of this insulator is to reduce the heat loss of the hot water in the mug, which is to keep the water hot/warm. The way it works is by wrapping it around the mug and then attaching the Velcro on each side together. There is also a cup and a coaster designed with it to prevent heat loss from the top and bottom of the mug.

The thing I’m proud of in this project is how my group manage to finish this project in time and design a cup insulator that well achieves the goal of its function, which again is to reduce heat loss. Evidence that can prove its insulating function is that the temperature of the hot water in the mug only dropped by 10.3 degrees Celsius with the insulator on, after 20MINMUTES.

There’s nothing hard about this project technically, but I believe the challenging part for my group is to make agreements in ideas. Since we always have different ideas and opinions in things, the challenge for us is to cooperate, accept and try different ideas from each other.

If I could redesign this insulator, I would probably use something else instead of a foam sheet and use other things like double-sided tape or staple pins to attach the materials. I want to use something else instead of hot glue because most of the hot glue melted during the test of the insulator.

Overall, I think this is an interesting project for our community and I had a lot of fun.