ELA Component

Hello, our names are Maya and Nihal.

For our ELA connection, we completed journals (option 1). We have chosen this component because we feel like it would be the most efficient way of demonstrating our material, thus making our project more presentable.

Our journals will be about what we did/our experience with our PBL project.

Journal 1

Today, our teacher, Mr. Paytakov talked about what PBL is and how it comes with tasks that we need to complete this year. He gave us an option of choosing Geometry/pre-cal or Chemistry, and most of us sighed, being familiar with this project from last year. We knew that this would be stressful and time consuming, so most of us knew not to procrastinate with this project. We raised our hands to ask the questions that were going through our minds as our teacher further explained the project. We asked if we can have partners for this project, and to our surprise he said yes. To be honest, doing our project individually last year was not difficult, but boring. We thought it would be a nice change to have a partner this year. Only two people were allowed in one group, and we (Maya & Nihal) chose to collaborate.

Journal 2

We chose to do Chemistry PBL, because we were taking different math classes. It took us a while to choose, but after doing so much research, we had finally found the perfect project called “Old Foamy”. It looked simple and fun to do, so we were looking forward to learning more about it.

Journal 3

It was finally time to start on our PBL projects. We decided to do separate websites, so we each created our own page, email, website name, and shared it. We found it very simple because we already knew how to construct all of those things since we had done it last year.

Journal 4

The next thing we had to do was our background research on our PBL project, and post it to our webpage. It wasn’t hard to find the driving question, but it was tough to put the background research into words. We had asked about our websites and wondered if we could have the same material. Mr. Paytakov let us know that we were to have different websites, with the same information.

Journal 5

That didn’t last long, however. Task 3 was to create our “About My School” page, so we just wrote our own thing for that. We had to link Harmony’s Facebook, YouTube, and website page. We inserted images and linked them, which was a struggle because it wouldn't work out with us, so we left it and worked on it another day.

Journal 6

Task 4 & 5 was a funny experience. We had asked Mr. Paytakov to do our experiment, and he said yes. We were looking forward to it because the project seemed pretty cool and we wanted to see the outcome. Mr. Paytakov gave us a box with some of our materials, and we gathered the rest. I took pictures of the materials while Nihal was logging on to the pbl website on the chromebook. We set up our workspace and placed our materials in front of us. We didn’t have any space on our phones so our friend, Karimah offered to videotape us with hers as we presented. I (Maya) started laughing as soon as Nihal introduced herself. I don’t know why, but I knew I was going to do that. I couldn’t help myself. It was getting to the point where we had to redo our experiment more than five times. However, we continued, telling ourselves we would edit certain parts. It was a matter of time when we finished. The experiment was really quick and simple. It was also fun to do and watch at the same time. There wasn’t as much foam as we expected, but it was still an enjoyable experience. Karimah had sent us the video, and when we opened it, it was blurry and we both freaked out. We came to the conclusion that we had to redo our experiment. I (Maya) didn’t have a problem with that because I did a horrible job the first time and couldn’t contain my laughter. Plus, our experiment was quick and easy, so it wouldn’t be hard to do it again. The pictures we had taken with my phone weren’t blurry so we went ahead and posted them onto our website.

Journal 7

We have to say, so far, doing the scientific investigation was the hardest part of the project. It was really stressful for us, and got to the point where we were about to quit. we’ve dealt with so many hardships doing this task. We didn’t know how to answer many questions so we did an unbelievable amount of research.

Journal 8

Today, since we didn’t have anything to do, we decided to change the layout of our page. We added a nice background of how our experiment looks (foam rising), and changed the color and font of the title page. We also changed the name of my website to “Old Foamy 2015-2016”.

Journal 9

We thought it was about time we shot our video for the second time. We talked to Mr. Paytakov, and he generously lent us his camera. I (Nihal) had done this experiment with guests at Harmony so we decided to double the size of our measurements since it would create a greater affect. Once again, we set everything up, and the moment we started recording, I (Maya) burst into laughter. I didn’t know what was funny, I just couldn’t contain myself. I wasn’t able to control it until the first six videos we shot were deleted. Then, I put my serious face on, and began doing the experiment. There were some big smiles here and there, but I was able to hold the laughter in. We managed to do a full length video, without having to edit anything. We were both really happy when we managed to finish, because it felt impossible for me to stop laughing. When we got home, we waited eagerly for Mr. Paytakov to send us our video. When we watched it, we laughed hysterically at our appearance and performance. We both looked like we didn’t know what was going on as the foam was rising. After all, it was our first time seeing the experiment after we doubled our measurements.

Journal 10

The brochure wasn’t hard to do, but it was a little time consuming. It was simple to make QR codes, and put them on there, but sometimes Microsoft wouldn’t cope with me. It was a bit tough to edit it because some things just wouldn’t work out. However, we got through it, and once again, managed to complete another task.

Journal 11

At this point, we wanted to edit my video and make it seem a little more presentable. We decided to play around with it and ended up adding background music. We messed around some more, and found ourselves inserting captions at the hilarious moments we experienced while filming the video. After that, we changed the name of the video, added tags, a description, and finally posted it onto our homepage on our website. We were really proud of my accomplishments.

Journal 12

Choosing our ELA component was actually very simple. We knew that we wanted to write journal entries right away, since we’ve had a quite memorable experience. We thought it was an effective way of presenting this project, and wrote that as the reason why we chose it. For our Social Studies Connection, it took us a bit of hesitation to finally decide on what we wanted to do. We decided to write about the way catalysts affects our society. We thought it would be an evident way of presenting our project since catalysts are used in our daily lives and it is, in fact, a prominent feature in our experiment.

Journal 12

As for actually doing the project, our social studies connection was a little time consuming because we had to keep editing it until our teacher was satisfied, which we totally understood, since we were in an AP class. After a decent amount of time, we decided to work on our journal. Obviously, we saved the best for last. We knew that we wanted to put great detail and effort into this task, so we are spending a tremendous amount of time writing this, and are greatly honored to have this opportunity. We are glad we got to do this because we remembered a lot of the memories we had while doing our PBL experiment. We're currently looking forward to I-SWEEEP and/or the STEM Festival, since we love to participate in the kinds of activities that enrich a student’s knowledge and allow him/her to learn and experience something new.