The Experience of Expression From the Teal Banders

The Teal Band has been working nonstop on their projects and even handled the news that their presentations had been moved up a day to help out another band quite well. What follows are their own words about this Expression phase.Piper: So far to learn about sheep and wool I went to Slide Ranch and talked to the person who takes care of the goats and sheep. She told me all about how they send the wool to a place called Lompoc to get cleaned and turned into yarn. I also completed a map showing the route that you would go on if you were going to Slide Ranch.I'm having fun. Next, I'll work on the written part. I'm making a book with 6 page that's like a comic book. A sheep is the main character and it's talking about how it's wool is getting processed into yarn.Freddie: My project is about Urban coyotes. I wanted to learn about why they are coming to urban areas like the city. I have been able to make a map, write a research paper, and start my slideshow.  One of my main problems was focus. I couldn't really focus and my experts weren't writing back to me, so I got some new ones and sure enough they replied. It was hard to find experts on a subject that hasn't been a real project. Next project I will focus more.Jared: I am working on a project with my friend Patrick. We, as our project are making a RC car. So far In my project with Patrick, I have learned many things.

• I've learned how to solder
• I learned how to use a glue gun and be cautious.
• And even a little bit how a RC car works!

The first thing we needed to do was to convince our educators to give us money to buy the parts, which we did both. When our parts arrived, I brought in popsicle sticks to build the frame of the car. After we made the frame of the car and showed it to our expert he said that we needed one more part and that our car frame was lopsided and that would be hard to work with, and since we're waiting for one more part might as well make a new one. This was bad because we only had five days left till we have to finish and the frame took more than a WEEK. So the next day, we got right to work. Patrick started to work on the car frame and I worked on presentations and took some photos of him working to include in the presentation.Patrick: Jared and I started the project half of the arc with the idea of building an RC car. We had some trouble focusing on writing our declaration, but we managed to finish it before the second week after winter break.

The two of us managed to get our declaration approved, and this is where we were like, "Ok. We're really doing this." We asked Jack to help us put a parts list together so we don't order parts that don't work together. We also asked Aiden to give us a soldering class. He taught us a few techniques for soldering and let us try to use them.

We spent about a month deciding the final parts that we would order. The parts arrived the next week and we got to work on our frame. Jared brought in a box of large Popsicle sticks that we cut then hot glued together into a chassis. We asked Aiden if he would help us solder our parts, only for him to tell us that our frame was lopsided and it would be very hard to make it work, and that we needed a new part so another part didn't get fried. He suggested that we make a new frame while we wait for the part, and once we finished that he would help us.

We stop there, for there is the end of our story, or rather all that we have. We still have to finish our car, finish our presentation and practice it, and then build a poster board for Expo night.

 Aurora:  For my project, I decided to work with Nora and Selina on a project about ancient civilizations. There are three main components to the project. The first component is personal civilizations. In this part of the project, each person in the project made a Google doc where we could write about our civilizations. The second component of the project is the trade route map. This we all worked on together. We printed out a map of North America, got some plexiglass and we traced our trade routes onto the plexiglass and then laid them on top of the map and put the plexiglass and the map in a frame. The last component of the project is our models. The models were in my opinion, the hardest part. We had quite a few iterations on our models. The first one we made out of paper they looked crude and ugly. The second and third iterations were made out of card stock and the final iteration was made out of foam board.Selina: In case you don't know about it, I am going to quickly explain my project. I did (and am still doing) a project with Aurora and Nora. We are each designing our own civilization in very different locations. I'm in a forest, Nora's in a prairie, and Aurora's in an icy snowy place. We each designed our own mode of transportation that would best suit our civilizations and made scale models of them. We also made maps of our civilizations and our trade routes.One of the things I learned through doing this is how to make a good to-scale model. This involves designing, cutting, and putting it together. To design, I decided to use SketchUp, which is an app that is used to design, well, anything. Sketchup is awesome, but it also involves learning how to use it, which is a given, I guess. Anyways, after I learned how to use SketchUp, I designed my first iteration in it. At the time, I thought it was pretty good, so I made my first paper model, then I made a to-scale paper model. I made two more paper models, but I added and changed some things. After four paper models, I decided I was ready to make my final foam board model. I got the foam board, marked it all out, cut it, then glued it together. Sort of anticlimactic. But, I did learn how to properly cut things with small Exacto blades. I also learned how to re-think my models and how to use advice from other people to improve what I built.One challenge we faced was adding the element of randomness to our resources. We did this by using something called wheeldecide.com. This was not a very good system, but it was the only one we could find.  This website worked by having you insert a list of things you would like it to choose from, then click a wheel. The wheel would spin, then it would give you the answer. The problem with this system is that it takes 5 seconds for the wheel to spin, and it needed to be spun at least 24 times. If you do the math, that means about two minutes of spinning every day, not counting recording the list and putting it into Google sheets, which takes most of the time. In total, it would take about ten minutes to get our resources, every day. But wait, there's more! We also traded with each other and used our resources to build things, which takes about 5 minutes. That adds up to fifteen minutes of resource stuff, per day! That might not seem like much, but we had a lot of stuff to do, and sometimes we would skip resources entirely, which means double time tomorrow! Yay! Basically, it took a lot of time every day. So, we had a problem. Now the question is, how do we solve it? Unfortunately, this isn't one of the stories where we figure out some genius solution that is super amazing and all. I asked my sister (Amelia) if she knew any solutions. She kindly answered that she could really easily code something that would give us a list of all our resources in less than a second. So, thanks to my sister, we can gain our resources and move on with our lives.Through this project, I learned a lot, but the most important thing I learned was how to work together with my friends, how to stay focused and include everyone's opinion. That is definitely something that is crucial in projects and friendships. Nora, Patrick, and Huxley's words to come soon :)