ELA Component

We have chosen to focus on the double ball bounce for our Physics PBL Project. For our ELA Component, we will complete a journal (Option 1). We will present this journal by adding it as a document under our PBL website. The journal we will be presenting will include the following: 10 entries, our thoughts about our project, the process of research, outcomes of the experiment, interaction with our peers, etc.

Journal 1: September 28,2016

Our names are Telisha ,Jocelyn and Monica and we attend Harmony School of Nature Dallas. We have chosen our physics PBL to be “Double Ball Bounce”. We are excited to be carrying out such a this experiment, because it seems like a fun and informative project. The project is pretty simple in design, but explains a lot about momentum and kinetic energy. We will drop two balls on top of each other and observe the height of each ball. We are looking forward to update our journal so you can be informed on our project.

Journal #2: October 5, 2016

Today we started researching our topic a little more to gather some background information on this experiment. We searched for the history of momentum and kinetic energy to understand the concepts that go into the ball being bounced. Finding information was difficult, because the topics were broad, but we dug deeper and found so interesting facts. The concept of momentum came about during the Byzantine era, and the term “momentum” was coined later on. Also, we realized how this information could be used for our social connection and how relevant it would be to our experiment.

Journal #3: October 14, 2016

Today we started to gather our materials and studied the procedures to our project. The materials that we gathered were a basketball, a tennis ball, and an Astro Blaster toy. These are what we need to answer our driving question, which is, “Why does a smaller ball bounce much higher than the height from which it was dropped when it is simultaneously dropped on top of a larger, more massive, ball?” We will be holding the tennis ball directly above the basketball so that the balls are touching. Then, we drop them and observe why the tennis ball goes shooting off above our heads at a high speed. After preparing we decided that we were ready to conduct our experiment.

Journal #4: November 9, 2016

Today was a crucial day in our yearlong experiment. We performed our experiment and filmed the action videos that corresponded. The experiment was pretty easy to carry out, but one difficulty we had was filming my action videos. It was difficult to get the actual action part in the frame, because when the balls bounced, the tennis ball shot way in the air. However, while we make our video, we will try to slow it down so the tennis ball can be seen in the frame. We are happy with the pace we’re going at, because we worked on task 12 of the PBL tasks and will post those soon.

Journal #5: November 3, 2014

Today we decided to have a little fun with our website. Originally, our site had a normal white background and the default font, but we changed that to make it look more pleasing to our audience. We also finished our task 12 and uploaded it to our PBL project page. It was a little difficult to answer all the questions and add the pictures, but we got through it and finished! We also worked on our SS connection and ELA component. We are making great progress, because we are halfway done with our ELA component.

Journal #6: November 11, 2016

Today we enjoyed creating the About My School page for our site. This page included information about us and about our school. It also contains information on Harmony Public Schools. We have a picture of my school and the Harmony logo. If you visit the page you can read the Harmony motto. This is an excellent addition to our website, because it allows the people that visit our website visitors to become informed about our school and school system. It also shows how we focus on STEM and PBL so we can excel in our core classes. This page was fun create!

Journal #7: November 16, 2016

Today we looked for some images we could use for our website and video. We found a lot of great pictures, but it is difficult to choose one, because there is not a single picture that shows everything we want in. However, we are trying to find some pictures that will help our audience understand more about the concepts of momentum and kinetic energy. Here are some possible pictures:

Journal #8: November 16, 2016

Today I created my video. I used the Windows Movie Maker video editing software. I combined my previously filmed action videos and text for our SS connection and ELA component. The video took us a few hours to make, but it was cool to see all the different types of edits we could do. However, it was difficult to get the video uploaded onto YouTube, because we had to add all the tags and information on to the description. After we finished uploading the video, we enjoyed watching it and also showed our parents to get their input on it. The said it was a great video and experiment,hopefully other people will enjoy it.

Journal #9: December 1, 2016

Today we uploaded everything to our website. We uploaded everything and made some final edits to the layout and theme. We are relieved that we finished our project, but we really enjoyed it and learned quite a lot. Our last journal entry will be tomorrow and after we upload that we will be done with our English component. We hope people will visit our website and will attempt to learn new concepts of Physics.

Journal #10: December 2, 2016

This is our last journal entry and we would like to talk about how we feel about PBL and talk about PBL in general. May students at school had hard feelings toward PBL, because they felt like it was a lot of work. However, we learned a lot of important skills by doing our projects. Firstly, PBL like activities are done in college, so since we are doing them in high school, we will be extra prepared for college. Also PBL teaches us how to use our time wisely. At the beginning of each quarter we were given a list of tasks that need to be completed and then left on our own to do them. This really taught us how we need to be able to accomplish things on time. Overall we feel that PBL taught us a lot even though it was time consuming at parts.