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Towers: an engineering journey

Towers: an engineering journey

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For the last project in Science this year; a spaghetti tower. A common school sight, these towers were surprisingly difficult to design. We were tasked with creating a tower at least 60 cm tall, with a base of 30cm * 30cm maximum. The top of the tower had to be 5cm * 5cm, able to fit a piece of paper. Then, they had to be earthquake resistant. For this assessment, we were given $60, with one spaghetti stick costing $1, and one gram of blu-tack costing the same.

The process of designing these towers was one filled with challenges; from how to actually stick spaghetti together with blu-tack to how to stop the tower tipping over completely. We went with a triangular design in the end, with rotating equilaterals going up to the 60cm mark. We then added more rotated triangles on the bottom layer to give it more weight, stopping it from tipping over. In the end, our tower was substantially more stable than I thought was achievable, and was practically immune to the shaking table.

As this was a group project, well, we were in groups. For me, I went with Kevin T. and Sau Yu C. We worked efficiently and were organised between us; with each of us filling out our roles. Sau was the reporter: an important role, keeping the project on track to be finished by the time needed. He also did some testing at home, speeding along our prototype. I was our project manager and speaker, organising what each person needed to do and overseeing the design, as well as asking for help when needed. Kevin was the equipment manager; making sure we didn’t go over budget and keeping our project realistic.

Overall, this was a great project, and while it may seem daunting with a $60 budget, it’s easier than it sounds.

Health Expo

Health Expo

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The Health Expo was a great experience for development and peer connection. We were tasked with creating a stall to help with wellbeing in teenagers. We were in groups of two. I was in a group with Samuel Arnold, with our topic being stress and how to manage it. We were given two weeks to research our chosen topic, with the goal of presenting to other Year 9s at the end of the term.

What were the biggest things you learnt while completing this task?

 I learnt how to collaborate more effectively in a group, but mostly I learned how incredibly effective meditation actually is on stress (and a whole bunch of other stuff). People are always talking about it, ‘meditation this’ and ‘meditation that’, but I never really realised how much of that was true. Collaboratively, I was working with Sam Arnold, who I’ve done a few projects with in the past. Despite this, the Health Expo was quite different, as we only had around two weeks to prepare. Our presentation may not have been the greatest of all time (probably due to the harsh time frame I mentioned before), but it was still a great learning experience for both me and my partner. I honed my visual design and research skills, and now feel a little more confident in presenting to peers. But, overall, the meditation is probably more impactful. I guess the main thing I’m taking away from this task is that I should start meditating.

What one piece of advice would you pass on to young people with regards to wellbeing above all else? Why?

Don’t take things too seriously, and take breaks. Sometimes you can get lost in thinking about how important something might be, but often there’s no real lasting consequences. If you remember to take breaks, this can also help massively reduce the stress of the task you are doing.

Write down a pledge that you will commit to in regards to your own wellbeing. Why did you pick these things to commit to? How will you stick to these commitments?

When I get stressed, whether it be due to school or other factors, I will take some time off what I normally do just to sit and think and meditate. I picked these things to commit to because it’s something related to my group’s presentation and I think it will really help to make a difference.

Overall, the Health Expo was a great experience for us Year 9’s, and it helped us learn many important things such as meditation (this is just specific to our group mostly), collaboration and having fun!

$20 Boss

$20 Boss

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$20 Boss was a great experience for me, and I’m going to explain the process my group and I went through to get our product ready for the market. At the start, our idea was Pokemon Lasercut keychains. We started with pixel art, and then decided on normal lines. This was a big game-changing choice, allowing for a lot more time to be used for other parts of the project.

We then decided to create some surveys for customer review, which then led to more time wasted than work being done. This was one of largest time wasters, in turn one of our largest problems. We spent most of Term 3 doing things that ended up not being useful in the end.

By Term 4, we had a new idea that we thought would bring in the money: lasercut Uno Reverse cards. These were a great idea, but by the time this had come into our heads it was too late to make many. And here’s our biggest problem we had to overcome: lasercutting. Since so many other groups wanted to lasercut, we had to time and produce effectively. We didn’t do this. So, with one week to go, we had to mass produce as fast as possible, leading to us having only 3 Uno reverse cards.

Overall, this was a reflection of our problems in producing our products and how we overcame them.

Sleek Geeks Science Video

Sleek Geeks Science Video

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Assistance received:

The school’s audio recording hardware.

Our film is about rising ocean levels, and how this affects people. This relates to the 2022 theme of change by relaying how as the Earth warms it slowly melts ice, causing higher sea levels. The higher sea levels are the change we focus on in our video.

We found most of our information on online articles, like nationalgeographic.com, or wikipedia.com. Also, over time I have come to possess knowledge on this topic through watching documentaries, watching YouTube videos, and reading.

  1. What is the project you have been working on?  What are the success criteria for the competition (i.e. how will your video be assessed)?  You may like to include a link to your video at this point (you can upload your video to Microsoft Stream).

We have been working on a video production in groups of 4, about scientific change in any form. Our topic was rising ocean levels.

  • How did you organise your group? Did each person have specific roles? Did each person have the opportunity to contribute their ideas?  How would you improve your work in this aspect if you had another opportunity to repeat the project?

Each person had a role, for instance: editor. Ryan mainly took charge for most of the project, I did the script. If I did this project again, the main change would be that I would choose a different group.

  • Did your group have any disagreements? What strategies did you use to resolve these conflicts? How would you improve your work in this aspect if you had another opportunity to repeat the project?

A few, to do with focusing and doing work. Not specifying any members of our group, but this was an argument we had.

  • How did your group manage your time? Did you finish the project on time? How would you improve your work in this aspect if you had another opportunity to repeat the project?

Our time was a little stretched, but in the end we finished on time, due to the efforts of some of my group members (also not naming names here). If I did this project again I would try to get everyone on the same page ASAP.

Christmas Market Reflection

Christmas Market Reflection

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This term in school, we were making a product to produce and sell at our All Saint’s Year 7 Christmas Market. This paragraph will cover some of the decisions we made before the market, and during the market.

Pre-Market:

Some of the decisions we made pre-market were the biggest ones, and possibly the worst ones as well. For example, group choice. We were told we could choose a group, but in the end I was in a group of four with Advait Nitin, Cooper O’Malley and Wade Lansley. This was a rather large setback, as it had taken us a whole week and a half to get together, but after all it worked out OK. For our actual product, we had multiple ideas, including gemstone soap and Christmas tree decorations, but we chose bath-bombs shaped like sticks of T.N.T. instead. This was a good product choice, we thought, because of it’s novelty, and because there was a limited amount of this product anywhere, there would be good supply & demand tactics by making this product.

Prototyping. Prototyping was one of our main issues, as the PVC pipe we had chosen was not wide enough for the bath-bombs to hold together after emerging from the tube. We spent much longer than we should have on this part of the process, so I think that we should have tried a larger tube much earlier on.

Product Pricing: We decided on $2.99 for our bath bombs, as that was still three times the cost per unit ($1.09), and we would have been using psychological marketing techniques. Advert: for our advert, we made multiple choices, but mainly we tried to market to boys between the ages of 10 and 14, as they would be our most likely customers.

During Market:

During the market we made many decisions to change our price and sell techniques, including:

We had to drop our price to $1.99, as we had competitors who were selling for less.

We had to make sure people came to our stall by (trying) to make it look festive and happy by waving our arms around and smiling. We also had to keep our heaviest bath bombs on the corners of the tablecloth, as the wind kept blowing it away

Our product

I think one of the most important things I learnt from this is to always be prepared for things not to work out how you think they will.

If I could change some things about how I did this project, this would be them:

First, I would try to get a good group from the start. Also, with the product idea, it would be preferable to have a good one (keeping in mind competitors, ‘affordableness’, demand for that product, etc.) by the first few weeks. Then, I would try to get prototyping done ASAP, as the faster that is done, the faster you can work out kinks in the production process. If we were allowed to choose stall location, I would put us as far away from competitors as possible, so that it seems like we are the only group selling bath bombs. Also, I would try to put as much festivity into the stall, because I think that this would help sales even more than the product itself. For instance: if there was a run-down restaurant and an extremely fancy restaurant, which one would you go to (even if the run down one serves better food)? You would most likely choose the good looking one, as it seems like a better place to eat. This is a variation of premium pricing, except in appearances. With packaging, (if our product needed packaging) I would make sure that we started on that as soon as prototyping is finished. Overall, these are the biggest changes I would make if I was to do the Christmas Market again.

This has been a reflection on the Year 7 Christmas Market Experience from my point of view!

Project X: Media

Project X: Media

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Media: A project on advertising. We made an (video) advert for a product/service, over the first half of the term. We got to decide groups, and I chose to be in a group with Michael BW. We decided to make an advert about Beijing Corn, a very special type of canned corn with lots of *health benefits*, including the 100% real IQ boost. Here is what happened over these few chaotic weeks:

Timeline:

Week 1: Michael and I were planning our storyboard, script and props.

Week 2: We started ‘recording’ but all our footage got corrupted.

Week 3: we did a redo of the recording, this time with corrupted sound.

Week 4: we finally decide that all our recordings are just too corrupted, and that we didn’t have enough time to record again, so we just did an dubover (by we I mean Michael, as we had to do it at home).

Week 5: we finally finished editing, and handed it in.

Beijing Corn
Corn Kernels – Seafood At Home

Product ideas:

Over the course of the first week, Michael and I came up with multiple hilarious ideas for our advert, but in the end we chose Beijing Corn for it’s diversity, originality and creativity. We made up heaps of (fake) benefits for our corn, including the beforementioned IQ boost. We also decided that Beijing Corn would be an easy product to advertise, as it had not been seen before.

Recording:

Recording. Our biggest challenge, and what made our ad not so great. All our recording attempts were corrupted in some form or another, from actual video, to sound, to video AND sound, so in the end we decided on a different solution. We would record the video, then put a voiceover. The only problem was, we could not do it at the same time, as we had run out of class time. This led to Michael doing the voiceover by himself, and it didn’t quite fit in time with the video.

Panasonic Video Camera HC-W585 | Officeworks

Conclusion:

In the end, our advert was not of top quality, as we had a few major setbacks in recording. This article has been a reflection on the Term 4 Media Advert assignment for me and my group.

Project Utopia

Project Utopia

Project Utopia

What is Project Utopia?

Project Utopia is a large project the whole of the Year 7 cohort was a part of. We were put in groups of four to five (My group was me, Adam Glass, Eva Small and Sienna Scahill), with the goal to make the Fremantle Port a community where all people thrive, and to display our work at a showcase in Week 9. Each group decided on a certain focus for their idea, with all the groups displaying their ideas in at the end of term. Previous year groups had the goal to create a utopia from scratch, whereas this year we are redesigning Fremantle Port. The Fremantle Port used to be, and is still for a short amount of time, a thriving port for all things between overseas shipping and ferries to Rottnest Island. As of recently, though, the decision has been made to shut down the Fremantle Port and transform it into a community. This decision, with the combination of our school choosing to help design the new port, led to Project Utopia.

The Project Logo

Liveability:

In our project, we were also tasked to connect to certain goals and factors. Some of the factors we included were the liveability factors of infrastructure and the subjective factor of connection to important people in their life. How we connected our project to each factor was different for each one, but they all tied in eventually. For infrastructure, we had a tram rail connecting the port to Fremantle, Fremantle to the port, and connecting different parts of the port together. For connection, we decided that the trams would have a rail going over the river, helping people minimise the time taken to get to Fremantle. This idea was thought up because we thought that the current system  of going all the way around the port to drive over the bridge was very ineffective and slow.

Sustainability:

One of our secondary goals was to make our project as sustainable as possible. How we overcame this challenge was in a few different ways; and underwater tunnel to maximise travel without power, solar panels to power the trams and run excess power to the grid, and to have our trams fully electric. Our underwater tunnel was a late addition to our project, being only thought of in the last few weeks (personally it’s my favourite thing out of what we thought up). The tunnel was a great way to help people understand about the river, but on top of that, it would hopefully reduce the use of non-sustainable transport across the river. With our sustainably powered trams, some initiatives we put in (or tried to put in) to make them more energy efficient included: to make them fully solar powered and to make the tram rail in a shape that used the least energy to travel around (etc. No loops). How we did the solar panels; we decided to make more ‘modern’ tram stops, for a more enjoyable experience, and we would put solar panels on top of the roof. We also put solar panels on car park shades that would be all around the entrance to the port so that people would not use their cars inside the port area.

Global Goals:

As the goals part of the previous ‘Goals and factors’ I talked about, the Global Goals come in. The Global Goals are a set of seventeen milestone achievements that were thought up by the United Nations to be achieved by 2030. The Goals we aimed to help complete were: Infrastructure, Clean and Affordable Energy and Climate Action. Infrastructure is very similar to the liveability factor of infrastructure, so I won’t go into detail here. The Clean and Affordable Energy goal was fairly easy for us to do, as a large part of our project was making our trams and tunnel sustainably powered. With our solar panels, we could provide enough power for the trams and some, so we could afford to give free or cheap power to residents or land owners. Climate Action we achieved by having nearly no carbon footprint from our project.

Collaboration:

Collaboration was also a big part of this project, with it being groupwork. We had to come up with ideas, argue most of our time away deciding who’s idea was best, and than finally incorporating that idea into our final plan, and repeat. Even though this doesn’t sound like good collaboration on the part of me and my group, this was not the only example. For instance, we managed to get work done EVEN when two or three of our group members were away due to sickness, holidays or sport. We actually did most of our script writing during this phase!

My learning:

I think, throughout this whole process, I learnt (or practised) some key things.

  1. Public Speaking: Throughout the Utopia Project, we had to do multiple public speaking parts, including English test speeches, the Showcase, etc. Through these experiences, I believe I greatly increased my public speaking skills, though I still struggle with a script.
  2. Collaboration: I know I talked about this before, so I’ll be brief, but I think I at least ‘mediumly’ increased my collaboration skills through communication outside of school about what to do, and communication in real life to determine who was doing what.

Vision Board:

Our task (aside from researching) was to make a vision board of our idea. For the people who have not encountered these very visual (for want of a better word) pieces of paper or card, vision boards are a large card rectangle with images of the desired outcome/plan. Our vision board was rather rushed, but we got it together in time. Our vision board consisted of a small description of our project, with sections for trams, the tunnel, and power, respectively. A small portion of our vision board actually got duplicated accidentally so we had to fix it really quickly, as the showcase was the week after.

Showcase:

Our whole project, we were planning for the showcase. This showcase was an opportunity to receive questions, and show off our work to some important people who work in City of Fremantle, and parents and display our vision board. Some of the questions, and quick modifications we made included:

  1. Disabled access to the tunnel: Originally we had just planned to have stairs, but one visitor brought up a good point that is should be accessible to disabled people as well, and because the project goal was to make Fremantle Port a community where all people thrive, we thought it would definitely be in our interests to change our tunnel entrance design.
  2. Tunnel placement (on this one we didn’t actually change anything, but I thought it would be good to explain this anyway): One slightly older visitor asked if the place we chose for the tunnel would be the best spot, due to river traffic, river depth etc. We explained that as of after the development, the river would no longer have large ships travelling in and out, and that the depth would be optimal there because it would still let slightly smaller boats through, like the Rottnest Ferry, and private river-moored boats.

This Project was definitely a great project, and there were quite a few fun experiences along the way. I wanted to share some of these experiences, and it will hopefully also help a greater understanding of Project Utopia:

In week one of the Project, we didn’t even do anything on what would turn out to be our sustainable tram system and underwater tunnel. During this week, we were tasked to connect liveability factors to Global Goals, and vice versa. This helped our later speech writing, but at the time I couldn’t figure out why we were doing such an exercise. In week two, we were told the full ‘briefing’, if you like, of the Project. We were told we would be redesigning Fremantle Port into a community where all people thrive, and that we would be making a speech and a vision board (or a physical model, but this idea was scrapped as there was not enough time). After this, we were sent to our groups to brainstorm ideas. Here I am going to skip a few weeks, as there was not too much happening that I can remember. At around week 6-7, we really started to work on the vision board, but not until week 8 did we actually put it together. We even did about a third of the researching for the vision board on week 8! On week 9, we had the showcase which I already talked about, so I am not going into detail here. Some visitors came and asked us about our plan, with multiple questions as well. (By the end of the showcase I think everyone was worn out).

Project Utopia was a really fun project to take part in, and hopefully someday we will get to see our design in the real-life Fremantle Port. It was a great opportunity to get to get to know people as well, with all the different ideas coming together, and it was pretty fun to see what we could make from the combination of ideas. Overall, this was a really interesting and fun project to do, and I hope that our ideas will have an impact on the final decision on the design of Fremantle Port.