This week has been a great first week of Inquiry. I feel that my productivity has been better working with a partner as I don't just let myself down when I procrastinate. We can also hold each other accountable to work as we created a planning sheet that assigns us different tasks that paint the overall Inquiry picture. I have learned many things through my research this week. Some of the most common scams are in the form of phone class, scammers call random phone numbers in the hope of finding a vulnerable elderly. They tell them that they must pay tax money immediately or risk arrestation. They also claim to be part of a lottery organisation, telling people they have won a car or trip overseas. The scam kicks in when they ask people to pay tax for the car or trip before receiving them. The first ever scam was commited around 300BC, by a man named Hegestratos. He planned to defraud an insurer by sinking his ship, empty of cargo, and selling the corn supposed to be on board. Unfortunately for Hegestratos, his scheme was discovered and he drowned after escaping his passengers, no doubt angry at his plan to kill them. One of the greatest scams of the 21st century was when the telecommunications company now known as MCI, inflated assets by as much as $11 billion, causing 10s of thousands of lost jobs and investors loss of over 100 billion dollars.
This week has been great. We conducted one of the best expert interviews that I hav ever done in an Inquiry. I am super pleased that we managed to book the TBC interview room and that we have access to such awesome resources as this. Our expert was knowledgable in most of the areas we were wuestioning him. Speaking over our expert, he was awesome enough to come in to school and talk to us which meant we didn't have to waste a period on creating release forms. This week I have learned a lot about scams, I feel the information rush that I generally associate with researching Inquiry's. I enjoy learning and finding information so these last weeks have been super fun! From the interview I now understand the process that the police take when a scam is reported to them. First the victim makes a formal report, gives police a statement, the statement is then forwarded to an officer, the officer investigates.
This week has been pretty good overall. I was not very happy with the advice we were given in terms of when to start our report. We were instructed by the teachers to start our report on the money of the last week as "we wouldn't have enough research completed before this time. I believe this was incorrect and even if it was correct it wasn't good advice as three days is not enough time to write a quality report. Despite this I managed to get all of the writing and extra tasks completed on the Sunday. I believe we have completed a solid Inquiry and our grades will hopefully reflect that. I have enjoyed working with Asher on this Inquiry, he has made me more productive and I therefore had less work to do on the weekend. His writing was not quite up yo standard but that's OK. He more than made up for that with the presentation. The presentation was well structured and designed to capture the audiences attention for the time that we needed to capture it for.