ELA Component

On the first week we created our emails and created the google site page and then we looked at possible projects to do and brainstormed ideas about if it were possible to do them based on our previous knowledge. After creating a list we minimized it into 3 project ideas and talked amongst our group to finialize our top three choices. Our three choices were buildging a floating maglev train, creating a mirrored projector, and building an electric swing with varied materials. Towards the end, we narrowed down our options and chose to build a maglev train with magnets.

On week 2, we discussed our project ideas with our instructor then finally chose our project which was to build a floating maglev train. After, we also looked through the materials to see which ones were needed to build the project and also did background research on what the purpose of maglev trains were. We also researched how we would build maglev trains with magnets and found that we would need to have magnets that repel each other, meaning monopolar magnets, to have the magnetic barrier between the train and the tracks.

We worked on out "What is StemSOS" page and defined STEM SOS as well as attatched hyperlinks to the background information of the US Department of Education, Live Science STEM, and STEM Education Coalition. Along with the links, we also provided information on what a STEMSOS model was, basically researching and writing out the sole purpose of the project. Afterwards, we added photos and other small details needed to complete the Stemsos page.

We then talked about our project which stated our introduction, problem statement, reasearch question, purpose, and hypothosis. We provided materials, variables, and steps to recreate our project. In this process, when we were creating our "My PBL Project" page, we planned over the steps of how to create our project and made a small draft on how what the project was, how we would make it, and what we would be measuring throughout the project.

On week 5 we were assigned with part 2 of creating our PBL page, but because we didn't have our materials yet to make the results containing pictures, data table, graph and figures, and analysis, we looked more into the research portion of our project and looked for a deeper analysis of how we hypothesized it would be. But we did complete references in this step of the process and found all the websites we got our information from.

On this week of the project, we worked on our research paper. As we were trying to keep our paper as organized as possible, we found a template to use and started adding the introduction, purpose hypothesis, procedure, applications, further research and bibliography. We still weren't able to recieve our magenet materials yet so we were still unable to plot in our data table and all pictures of our experiement.

On week 7, we started with our ELA and SS components. To start, we first did some more research on maglev trains with things like how it was invented, who and when it was invented. After doing so, we split up the parts and had some people working on the social studies component where we talked about the history behind maglev trains and also how it influences the economy. For the ELA portion as we weren't able to complete all yet because we were still on task 7, we only wrote what we had so far by going over the google document we previously created to record our progress in the project.

On week 8 of our project, we finalized our ELA and SS component of our site and asked for some feedback from our peers just to make sure we had good information regarding the history and influence of our project. We also started to compose our project by cutting our wood pieces and preparing them to be attatched to magnets. We were able to get most of our materials by now and so we started to construct the magnetic part of our project and attatched the magnet onto the wood block to see if it would work.

On the week of May 16, we cut up wooden blocks and assembled our magnets to create our track and mini train. We assembled the track by hot gluing two rectangular shaped magnets onto a wooden platform; one on each side with two inches of seperation. To assemble our mini train we cut out a small wooden block that had two rectangular magnets hot glued on; one on each side with half an inch of seperation. It turned out to be a complete failure, because we used magnets that had both north and south pole which made it a polar magnet when it was supposed to be nonpolar.

After finishing our experiment for the most part, we started recording videos to show how the maglev train was floating and also took photos so we could add it onto our website. We also started planning out who would do what in the video and wrote out the script of our informative video. We took out time to plan out how we would edit the video and created a flow plan to use as to how we would organize and order the video to be short, informative and effective to the audience.

On week 11, we tried rebuilding our experiement and were unable to again find the exact materials of magnets which made it difficult to maintain the floatation fo the block. But even so, we were able to complete the making of our project with magnets that were larger than supposed to. In the end, we successfully built the floating maglev train but because of the size of the magnets, the balance had to be supported very well in order for the floating maglev train to work. Along with this, we also started on the measurements of our experiment and we also started the recording of our video.

On week 12, we finalized everything and started making the brochure required for the PBL project. We also finished up with recording our video and editing it as well. We worked as a group to look through our PBL website and looked over all components and categories. We also themed out website to make its appeal better. Overall, we finalized all steps of this project. f