strides

The Hawks have made incredible strides and progress on their projects! Here's what's been happening:Clementine and Lola began project phase with the goal of creating a one-minute ball run on an incline plane. They had been frustrated with the difficulty of this task until Sean suggested a more interesting and challenging provocation of creating a ball run that focuses less on time period and more on precision and regularity. They worked together on assembly and learned to set up jigs to be able to mass-produce components of their ball run with the drill press.The girls have learned new strategies for working through conflicts that arise and have often been able to take initiative on next steps without any prompting! Clementine has been making great strides this week despite Lola being out sick.Bruno's project has also evolved from a garden-style sundial with a flat face and a movable gnomon after he discovered that the spacing of numbers on the garden sundial need to be different at each latitude. He devised a plan to create a portable equatorial sundial on hinges to allow the gnomon to change angles depending on his location.Mackenzie says, "He has found the perfect hinges so that the face can lay flat when closed, in case he ever finds himself using his sundial at the north pole. He has also figured out a clever way to arrange the wood so it can’t open any further than 90 degrees, perfect for a trip to the equator. He is going to embed a compass and levels into the sundial for maximum accuracy."Ben and Quinn, as of this afternoon, have successfully completed their working clock! It is accurate to 5 seconds, which is an incredible accomplishment. They realized the fussiness of a precise clock during this project phase, and this final iteration is the last in about six different versions of their clock.During this process they have learned the merits of hard, focused work and cooperation, and made good decisions about finding a quieter work space, like in the Blue Room, so that they could keep on task.Natasha has been busy consulting experts for her research project, including a research manager for Nashville tourism and circadian rhythm scientist Carrie Partch. She worked on four versions of her sleeping and eating survey and came up with ways to entice students into filling them out.Natasha started organizing her data into graphs last week, starting by looking at her hypothesis and choosing two pieces of data to compare in a scatter plot. Mackenzie reported that she was thrilled to discover that her scatter plot had proved true that late bed times lead to less sleep. "What struck me wasn’t her findings," Mackenzie writes, "but the excitement she had at having found a discernible pattern in the mass of data she had gathered."