Ethan's Blog

Hello people it is me ethant36 and today i am going to write about my innovation day project. We were asked to make a castle with a working drawbridge. To do that you need to use a pulley. For the challenge you had to use gears. A pulley is a simple machine that is for lifting things. Pulleys help you lift things because when you are using them you don’t need to use brute force and you can use some weight. Here is a picture of a pulley

 

Compound pulleys are pulleys with more than one pulley.

Compound pulleys help be cause if the load is 100 pounds and you have two pulleys, you only need to use 50 pounds of force.

If you have three pulleys you divide the load’s weight by three and that is how much force you need to use.

Here are pictures of compound pulleys

 

Gears

Gears are technically not simple machines but they are pretty simple.

Gears are for having one gear move another one and they can move each other.

 

When one gear is being turned, that gear is called the driver gear. The gear that is being turned by the driver gear is called the follower gear.

Note how when one gear is going clockwise, the other gear is going counterclockwise.

The Idler

The Idler is when there are more than two gears and the idler is the one in the middle (if there are three gears).

The idler makes it that if the driver gear is going counterclockwise the follower gear also goes counterclockwise.

Here is an example

Ignore how gear B is in gear C.

Notice how gear A  is going clockwise, gear B/C (the idler) is going counter clockwise and the follower gear, gear D is going clockwise.

What the idler does is if the driver gear is going clockwise then the follower will too.

Since we are building a castle, we need to know about castles and what they look like and we also needed to know about the feudal system and the medieval part of things so here is my google slides about it.

 

Here is my hypothesis (How me and my partner thought we were going to build the castle)

Here is our procedure video

Final video:

Here are two pictures of my rubrics

Self reflection

My self reflection questions were What did you like/ dislike and why and what I would do differently next time. I liked the project because there was lots of building and I like building. For what I would do next time I would try to do a little more things in the inside. I liked our pulleys and gears but the inside was kind of bare.

 

Hi, it’s ethant36

Today I’m going to tell you about my stop-motion project in class. Stop motion is a lot of pictures and you watch them. If you do it well, it will look like a movie.

My task was to re-creating a scene from a book called The Wild Robot. We choose the scene when the RECOs come and attack and the first part of the battle. Here is a PDF version of the book.

We choose this scene because it included action

Pre-production: here are some pictures of the script:

Pre-production: here is a picture from the storyboard plan

Pre-production: here is the set design

 

Here is our Stop Motion film:

 

Self reflection

The actual movie was good and I like it but sometimes I feel like my group did not do enough work in the time.

 

Here are pictures of my self assessments

Hello people it is me ethant36 and today I will tell you about my second science unit: sound.

What is sound?

The first thing I will tell you about is what is sound. Sound is a series of vibrations that cause sound. The 4 properties of sound are: Sound can be reflected (echoes). Sound can be absorbed, too. It is absorbed with soft materials.  Sound can be modified (speakers modify sound). Finally, sound is caused by vibrations.

                           Vibrations

You cannot always see the vibrations but they are vibrating. Sometimes with watches you can make it vibrate (you can feel that sometimes!) but if it is making sound it is vibrating. One fun experiment: The materials you need are sour cream container or anything like it, tuning fork, salt, plastic wrap, rubber band, and water. Instructions: 1. put the plastic wrap over the container tightly with the rubber band.

                           Absorbing sound

Here is a picture of a recording room. The foam absorbs the sound so there is almost no echo. The foam on the wall is amazing for absorbing sound. They do not want movies to sound weird.

Echoes

Echoes are sound being reflected. Echoes bounce of of surfaces and you can sometimes hear the word again. Concrete and hard materials like it echo more than soft materials, which absorb sound.

Pitch

Pitch is how high the sound is. It is measured in Hertz (Hz) humans can hear sounds from 20hz to 20 000hz. Dogs can hear higher sounds than humans which is why humans can not hear. Dolphins and bats can hear even higher sound than dogs.

 

               Here is a picture of my model ear:

Here is a video on how ears work

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Volume

Volume is how loud a sound is. Volume is measured in decibels (dB). A whisper is about 30dB a normal voice is about 60 dB and a scream is about 120dB. If people are around noises over 90dB all the time their hearing can be damaged and if a human hears a sound over 130dB their hearing can be damaged immediately.

 

Reflection of learning

I liked the sound unit and I liked the experiment.

 

Hope you liked it!

 

 

 

Hello people it is me ethant36 and today I will tell you about my first unit in science, light.

Our first thing was natural vs artificial light and then luminous (object that makes its own light) and non luminous (object that can’t make its own light)  and their meaning.

Then we did an experiment about how light travels. The point of the experiment was to find out if light travels in straight lines.

Then we learned about reflecting light and which materials are good reflectors. We learned what secular (smooth and good for reflecting) and diffuse (Bumpy and bad for reflecting)mean and transparent, translucent and opaque meanings and then refraction (where light appears to be somewhere that it is not because light moves more slowly in water than air). That was our first science unit that we did in grade four. 

Here is what I learned:  I learned about refraction, how light travels, and reflection.

For our next science unit  I want to learn about simple machines.

Science is fun! 

Here are some pictures of experiments 

 

One Saturday, I had a playdate with my friend Jonas. 

Before Jonas came, I was coming home from soccer and we were worried that Jonas would get to my house before we got home from Carleton. When we came home and found out that Jonas was not already at our house, we were relieved.

First, Jonas drove over to my house and we played frisbee on the lawn,  but after that, we all decided to go to the park and it is a five minute walk.

The shoes we were wearing were not good for the park, Which is why we went inside to change our shoes and socks because I was wearing crocs and no socks and Jonas was wearing new, white shoes. 

Then since we both put on running shoes,  we went to Mckellar park and we played frisbee, did an obstacle course, played on the swings, and then we went back home and had banana bread for a snack because we were hungry.

Next, we played in my basement with a ball because we have pretty much nothing in the basement (we just moved in a little more than a month ago). 

Then, I showed Jonas a website called Chess.com. 

After that, we went back downstairs and then we had chicken balls, pasta, cold salmon and potatoes for dinner. 

Finally, Jonas went home. 

That was a fun day!