For the last few weeks, I have been volunteering for STEAM Train, a program that my school organized to help middle school students think of creative ways to solve world problems. Some examples of these problems can be making useful things out of ocean plastic and strengthening existing materials. The high school volunteers are supposed to guide the students so that they know what is achievable and what is too out of their reach at the moment to get done. Some of the projects that I helped out with was making materials like Kevlar stronger, making edible water bottles easier to be carried around, and using immortal jellyfish to achieve human immortality. Even though things like these probably already exist, they wanted to improve on them and do the research for it to be possible to happen, even though they probably won’t be able to. I chose to volunteer here because I thought it would be fun to help younger students with STEAM-related projects. However, because of the pandemic going on, I was skeptical about being involved in this as I don’t know whether learning this kind of thing over ZOOM is actually helpful to them. From my experience in Online school, the classes like English, History, and French are easy to learn online because of the out of classwork, but the classes like Math and Science are not as easy to learn outside of class. We also don’t have as much class time, so the teachers don’t have as long to teach us the content that they would have if we were in person. A lot of my classmates are struggling with keeping up with the amount of coursework we are getting from our teachers, as a byproduct of less class time. Also, they are already attending online classes for 5 or more hours a day, so they could just be burnt out from it. But anyway, back to the camp. One specific project that I helped out with was using “immortal” jellyfish to obtain human immortality or to have a longer lifetime. Obviously, they didn’t have any kind of plan to do it, but they just thought it was a cool idea. It’s good to think of ideas like that, but I think that them coming up with ideas like that and then getting told that they couldn’t actually do it is worse than finding out themselves. To improve on this experience for them, I would make some slightly stricter guidelines on what projects they could do. Some examples could be that you could complete it in a set timeframe, or whether it is possible with the equipment they have access to. Another thing that I would change in this camp is adding a peer review type of time when other groups have to look over your idea to see if it is doable. In this article, the author describes this by talking about how learning is best achieved by criticizing rather than ideation. I have only been to a few sessions so far, but I plan to go to all of them until it ends. Keep in touch for updates!
EOH Mousetrap Car
Hey guys and girls, welcome back to my blog. For the past few weeks, I was working on a mousetrap car to put in a competition at the U of I. I was working in a team of three with two of my best friends. We made many prototypes, 5 in total. Our first one was just a trial, like throwing things at a wall and seeing what stuck. We made a simple car much like everything you see online. However, when the spring was loaded and the arm was up, the string snapped and the arm came down with tremendous force, snapping the entire body of the mousetrap in half. In our next prototype, we still used balsa wood, but we changed the type of string to fishing line, because of how much stronger it is. We made it longer and used wood for our arm on the car. For our third prototype, we used plywood. We could not cut this with our hands, however, so we needed a laser cutter. However, we had tilted wheels at this point and it was going everywhere. We thought our fourth prototype would be our final one, because of the gear mechanism inside it, but we made one final one. The gearbox could keep the car small and light while still maximizing the power and distance possible. We modeled this car after a drag racer, as you can see from the bigger rear wheels and the slanted position. We used wire at first to secure it to the body, but then we started to use zip-ties because they are stronger and easier to use. On the final model, we used many of the same concepts as the 4th one, but made it almost entirely of legos, making it a lot lighter than using plywood.
Today, on competition day at the U of I, there was a multitude of buildings to go through, finding different projects all over campus for the EOH. My personal favorite was the solar car parked outside of the Electrical Engineering building. It was built to be able to go from Nebraska to Oregon without any fuel besides the sun. Wow! But at our competition, there was a lot more waiting than there was actually doing things about our mousetrap car. We took our cars upstairs to the testing hallways, ran them three times, and then went back down to present to the judges. For the awards, we were given the best presentation award. Our school had gotten that for many years in a row now, so we were extremely happy about that.
That is it about the 2019 EOH Mousetrap Car Competition. I hope you enjoyed this blog post. If you did, tell someone about my blog. If you hated it, complain to someone, and maybe they will come to my website (hehe)! See you guys next time!
Flappy Bir… Boeing?
Today my sister, Dad and I went to one of the seminars of Saturday Engineering for Everyone. These are presentations made by experts on things you may have never heard before, for everyone in the family. We heard about this through the University of Illinois, and we had gone to one before.
Today’s talk was about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) being adapted to birds. The presenter was an assistant professor named Aimy Wissa, who works in the Mechanical and Science Engineering part of the UIUC. She was explaining about how birds’ wings would be better on UAVs. She proved this by showing many graphs and lots of data. One particular graph showed how much less drag would be applied on the wings of the UAVs. There was a significant drop in it. These would also require a lot less energy than constantly powering the propeller to lift it. However, she said if you saw a full size Boeing with flapping wings, it’s probably your stomach’s best interest to not go on it (hence the name of the blog post). It would go up and down, as she showed us in a demo. They had made one of these UAVs, named Shadow, and flapped the wings for us. It produced a lot of wind underneath and beside it. To explain the lift, drag, thrust, and down force, they made a diagram with each part. I could apply this to my life, because coincidentally I am doing a project of building a mousetrap car. To reduce drag on the car, I could put a curved piece on the front of my car. This would reduce drag, and therefore increase the speed of the car. The only downside is that it will increase the weight of the car, making it a little slower. This might balance out, because the car is so small.
Thank you for reading my blog post. I hope you come back to read more. Bye for now!
Geothermal Power Plants
For the past week, a group of classmates and I were working on a science project. We were in the energy unit and we have chosen the topic geothermal. While we could have gotten something cool like solar power, we got the act of extracting heat from the Earth. BORING. However, this was before we even knew what it was.
Geothermal energy is the heat that you get from the inside of the Earth. All of this heat is made in the core of the Earth and then it goes to the stored water underground. But this water is hard to come by, so it takes time to find a spot to start making energy from it.
We made a reenactment of how the hot water from the ground gets 
transferred to electricity and then it is sent to your house. Though this does not actually work, it shows what happens in real life. As you can see in the picture, cold water goes into the hot water below the ground. Then, the steam produced by the hot and cold water mixing together is taken up to the plant. Next, they turn the steam into electricity and it goes to your home. And the best part about it is that it is a 100 percent renewable energy source! Unfortunately, only 15 percent of Americans use fromsof energy that aren’t extracted from the earth (not including geothermal).
We made this model using cardboard and wood pieces. The generator is made with popsicle sticks and wood blocks, while the power plant and the house are both made from cardboard. As you can see, we used shoeboxes for the housing of the representation.
From this project, I have learned that geothermal energy is a good energy source. In the future, I want to find out more about why more people do not use this form of energy production as much. Thanks for reading!
JUMPing into the ER!
I never knew how paramedics did their work, so today my family and I went on a 1 and a half hour car ride to Peoria, Illinois. My sister and I learned about their work during an Emergency Room simulation at Jump Simulation.
There were many stations, teaching us what a first responder/paramedic would do in their daily life. We then walked to the skills lab for our briefing about the camp.
There were twenty-four attendees there and were split into 3 groups. Our first instructor was Mr. Jeff, and he taught us how to use an Ambu-bag also called a BVM. That is a tool that breathes for the patient if they can’t by themselves. First, you put the mouth cover in the patient’s mouth and nose. After you secure it there, you will have to compress the airbag on the end of it and do it once every 6 seconds.
After 30 minutes, we moved to another station. That was in the ambulance section of the area we were in! In there, we learned all about how a defibrillator works. A defibrillator is a machine used to treat life-threatening conditions that affect the heart’s rhythm. It is a device that can print out “receipts” for the doctors as well.
Our last station before the snack break was an activity in a fake apartment. We were supposed to pretend that there was a 90-year-old man who had a stroke and needed medical attention immediately. Our instructor taught us what a first responder would do, and then she let our group do it by ourselves! That was fun and seeing everything so lifelike was cool. (by the way, the 90-year-old man was a mannequin). We successfully got him onto a stretcher and then carried him to safety.
Finally, we had our break in the middle of the time. By then it was already 10:00 and the time had flown past us! But the bad thing was that the more boring part was the second. At least, that’s what they said. In the slideshow they had prepared for us, it said we had Med. Calc., CPR, and Vital Signs.
Vital signs were all about blood pressure, heart rate, breathing, and that sort of thing. That was pretty fun because all of the group members checked each others heart rates. We also used blood pressure monitors.
Next was my personal favorite, Med. Calc. Now, this may seem like such a stupid topic, but this is very easy and useful as well. We learned about how to tell how much medicine we should give to a patient. And I really only liked it because it was the easiest of all the stations.
Finally, the last station. CPR. CPR actually stands for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, but most people only know the abbreviation. We learned the correct position that our hands should go in and exactly how deep to press on a full grown person. We all took turns of doing CPR on a mannequin connected to some wires. These wires were there so that our instructor could see on a monitor how deep we were pressing, and lots of other things. But the coolest thing about it was that it was in a real-life ambulance! Sure, the engine and all of the working parts inside of it were gutted, but it still was really cool seeing the inside of it!
And then we all went back to the Skills Lab, where we started off. Everyone got their own certificate and then we all packed up to go home. I learned lots of things from this camp to do in life-threatening situations, and I will definitely remember it for later in my life. I would recommend this camp to anyone who wants to learn about being a first-responder or even a paramedic. I know I will be coming back!