As the end of the year is closing in, our teacher, Mr. Everitt has announced from the beginning of the year that at the end of the school year, we will be working on a Passion Project. As the name implies, a Passion Project is meant to be a project which shows what you are passionate about. For our passion project, me and another 2 colleagues from the Mechatronics Academy, who are both interested in the Mechanics field as much as I am, have decided on a Passion Project which involves the disassembly of an old riding lawnmower, and turning it into a fully functional go kart. The moment we chose this idea, the moment we knew that we would require quite a large amount of time. Throughout our passion project work, we have managed to finish the technical draft and CAD Model of our little machine. However, we had a major time problem. Due to our teacher's decision that we will no longer get any class time on passion projects, and also due to one of our colleague's work hours, we have hardly had the ability to hold a straight schedule. However, in the upcoming days, we are looking into asking our teacher, Mr. Everitt, for an extended deadline in regards to our project. I personally believe that we were a little too ambitious in terms of climbing aboard with this passion of ours, but as I've mentioned above, if we can secure an extended deadline, then I believe that we could still have a second shot at completing our little dream.
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Throughout the last 2 weeks of the month of May, all academy members, including myself, have been working on a new Engineering Design Challenge know as the Minefield Challenge. In this challenge, the objective is to construct a robot in teams of 4, and the robot needs to be capable of picking up little VEX competition balls off pillars and dispose them into a container in order to gain points and advance through the competition. But before the group work could begin, each academy student had to first work on their own technical draft and CAD model for their own robot design. After all the designs have been finished, the students could group into 4 members and choose one of the designs they came up with. However, you can also take different features from the designs and combine them into creating a totally different robot. As all the robots have been constructed, the competition began. I could say that I was shocked by the fact that our robot has managed to get into the finals of the competition and also win first place. It was an amazing competition overall. I believe that everyone learned a lot of new experiences from this and that they will know how to become better in the future. Nevertheless, I was proud of our robot's success with the challenge. Not only am I proud of the robot's accomplishment, but I am mainly proud of me and my team for pulling off first place in this exhilarating competition. As one of our year-end assignments for English Language and Arts and Career and Life Management, we were tasked with writing, reciting, and presenting our own speech. This speech, however, had to be related to the topic of education. This could range from a speech about the Mechatronics program overall, all the way to a speech regarding learning styles and learning methods. In the end, I personally believe that this assignment has helped me in strengthening my public speaking, memorising, and overall organisation skills. Everybody around the world has their own goals that they want to pursue in life. Whether they are big or small, we, as humans, find our goals very significant and important, and we are driven to accomplish them. But don't we also need a plan for our goals? Well, that's where SMART helps us with our goals more profoundly. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. In this blog post, I will be listing my two goals that I am willing to pursue, using SMART Goals.
My school-related goal is to graduate high school. This goal is currently in progress and I will keep track of my grades and credits during my progress. It will be reasonable enough to be accomplished, because I will be able to pursue post-secondary education after it will be done. I find the goal worthwhile, because I will be able to accumulate more and more information throughout high school. I will have this goal done by the end of high school. My personal goal is to purchase a new computer within my budget. This goal is right now in progress, and I am continuing to monitor the money I save for it. This goal will be accomplished when I will have my sum of money completed. It also requires researching online and in stores to find the computer that will be within my budget, and that will also have decent components. I find this goal reasonable for me, because I'm currently in high school, and the computer I will buy will be helping me with schoolwork for the next couple of years. I plan to accomplish this goal before the holidays that will be coming up in 3 months. SMART Goals is a very helpful and also entertaining way to organise your goals, no matter the size or the goal. I'm looking forward to using this technique in the future, and I recommend it to anybody who is struggling with organising their goals. Today we had a guest coming to our school to talk about the Internet and how it affects our lives. His name is Paul Davis and he is an IT expert with over 27 years of experience. In his presentation, he covered everything about Internet safety and explained to everybody how pictures, posts, and comments that we make public will never disappear off the Internet. He says to take responsibility of our actions and to keep our digital life as private as possible. I can consider that Paul opened my mind more when it comes to the Internet and what it can do. Last Wednesday, on September 13th, our school has planned a field trip for all the grade 10 academies to the Rocky View Schools Education Centre across the street. During our visit at the centre, teachers and guests talked with us and gave us advice on how to manage and design our digital footprint(Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account, or our own website). Moreover that, they shared their experience around technology and how they're dealing with their digital footprint. Later in the day, after lunch, we headed back to the centre to meet with other guests that helped us in creating a bio for our digital footprint. In my opinion, I consider I've learned useful information from all the guests that joined us on Wednesday, and I'm looking forward to learn more about designing our own digital footprint.
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