Minor Details - October 4

October 4 - 8, 2021

Understanding Water Issues

Today's post is written by Logan Marges

Where does water come from? Well frankly it comes from the formation of hydrogen and oxygen mixing together forming H2O. H2O gets its name from the chemical symbol H for hydrogen and O for oxygen. The 2 shows that there are 2 atoms of hydrogen to form a molecule of water.

How is water distributed on Earth? According to Penn State, the distribution of water on the Earth's surface is extremely uneven. Only 3% of water on the surface is fresh. The remaining 97% resides in the ocean. Of freshwater, 69% resides in glaciers, 30% underground, and less than 1% is located in lakes, rivers, and swamps.

Why can’t we make water? Making enough drinking water to support the global population is dangerous and a large-scale project. There's water around 24/7. We just can't see that the air away has moisture. In 2008, for the Olympic Games, China tried to prevent rain for the opening ceremony in Beijing using a process called cloud seeding. This process involves spraying silver nitrate into storm clouds.

Why can’t we convert salt water into fresh water? Actually we can and people have been doing it since ancient Greeks. Nowadays it costs around $1-$2 to produce 1 cubic meter to convert which is very expensive.

Here are some facts about our planet. Our planet has 1,482,025,340 million trillion liters of water but only 1% is drinkable. You might be drinking aquifer water from the last Ice Age. As I’m writing this, in 18 years, 87 days, 9 hours, 40 minutes and 14 seconds the world will run out of water. Click here for the link to the website.

Procedural Instructions for Original Games

We have been sharing our procedural instructions for our original games. In these photos you see Macy's game "Quiz Whiz", Will's game "High Five" and Sheyanne's game "Candy Rush".

We will use feedback we get from our peers to make any necessary changes to our instructions.

DragonQuest 2

Congratulations to all these students who have demonstrated the responsibility and commitment necessary to achieve DragonQuest this cycle:

Sheyanne Berry, Josh Lowry, Isaac McQuiggan, Logan Marges, Macy Melinko, Trinity Rees, Jessica Collins, Chloe Marsh, Matthew Peets, William Laur, Bannon Sexton and Jersey Warner.

DragonQuest 3 will end on Tuesday October 19. Remember that Google Classroom is an excellent resource to stay current on all class notes and assignments.

Writing Excellent Sentences

Have you ever had to re-read a sentence several times to understand it's meaning? When that happens, it's a sure sign that the sentence should probably be re-written.

Two of the most common mistakes students are making in their writing are sentence fragments and run-on sentences. In the notes from the lesson below, you can see some examples of each.

Our first step is to learn how to identify sentence fragments and run-on sentences in our own writing. Our second step is to make our sentences more interesting by using punctuation, including different types of sentences and creating compound sentences. Reading JK Rowling's writing in "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" is giving us a great model for interesting sentences!

Using Graphs to Represent Patterns

Linear growing patterns can be represented in many ways.

Over the past few weeks, we have been practising representing patterns visually (i.e. with tiles), with data tables and with equations (or pattern rules).

We are also learning how to identify the multiplier and constant from a word problem so we can write equations and solve problems. We've learned that the equation is incredibly useful when we need to answer a question for "any number".

Today, we are starting to explore what linear relationships look like when they are graphed.

In the graph you can see that William is following all the criteria for graphs that we developed a few weeks ago.

Our next step is to look at the 4 lines on the graph to discover relationships between the lines.

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