Category Archives: Fun

Coding on Scratch

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Hello and today I am going to talk about my Ted like Talk. My Ted like Talk was coding on Scratch. Scratch is basically a coding platform where you can make anything you want with no real life coding experience. Scratch is powerful, yet surprisingly simple once you get the hang of it. You can also learn a ton about coding that could maybe help you in the future. A Ted like Talk is when a person gets on a stage and talks about what they were passionate about. For me that was Scratch. In my Language Arts class we did mini Ted talks that were about 5 minutes long.

In order to prepare for my talk, at first I tried to make the slides on scratch to make them seem animated and cool, but my parents said it was too complicated so I switched to google slides. Click on this link to see my slides. Slides link In google slides I added different pictures of the coding blocks and other pictures of other things related to coding on scratch. After that in order to remember what to say I wrote a script. You can see the whole script is you click on this link. Script link I spent hours on the script and in total it was 1,200 words. Then I signed up to present for a couple days later giving me time to practice.

When the time came I printed my script and displayed my slides on the TV. Then I started presenting my Ted talk. The hardest part was reading the script and keeping eye contact with the audience so sometimes I would skip over parts of the script. I was also very nervous the whole time. Then I went into scratch and showed the audience one of my games. It was called escape the baddies. This game wasn’t that complicated so it was sort of easy to understand. In the end, I think a Ted like talk was a good idea to end the school year and it taught me a lot about speaking to an audience.

 

 

Stock Market Project

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In the last two months of school, my Language Arts class did the stock market project. The reason we did this project is because one of the protagonists in the book we are reading, The Westing Game, Turtle Wexler also follows the Stock Market. The Stock Market is a form of gambling. What you do is you buy a share of a company and hopefully the company will make more money than it did when you bought the stock. Then you sell your stock and make a profit. The trick is to buy low and sell high. Seems simple right? The problem is knowing if a stock is going up or down. What investors do is they look at the news and other sources to try to find out if they will make a profit on the stock. In our game, each person had an imaginary $20,000 to pretend to spend on stocks. We then kept track of our stock on a spreadsheet that looks like this

As you can see these are the stocks I invested in. By the first week not much changed, I had made $30. Then things started to go down. Tesla started losing money and their stock started going down super fast. Also MOMO and GoDaddy were not doing so well. Although Apple and Amazon did cover up for some of the damage, I lost about $650. This was the same with the second week. Tesla, MOMO and GoDaddy were all doing even worse, but Apple and Amazon were doing pretty well. The third week came and things were slightly better. Tesla started recovering, but MOMO and GoDaddy were still doing terribly. The good news is Apple and Amazon were doing great and they were covering up for my losses. In the end, I lost only $170. Finally, it was time for the stock market game to end. Things have gone great! Tesla was doing insanely well and was almost up to $200 dollars per share. Sadly MOMO and GoDaddy did badly, but Amazon and Apple also did super well putting me at a total of +1107 dollars!

In fact I won the most money in my class so I got a handful of candy! I would recommend the stock market for anyone willing to spend money to get more money in the process.

Virtual Reality in Spanish. By Jackson

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Virtual Reality in Spanish. 

By Jackson 

Last week in Spanish the class did an activity that I never knew even existed. At the start of class we got some glasses to wear. These were not ordinary glasses, instead they were virtual reality glasses. A VR headset is glasses that have screens for lenses so it feels like you are actually in the game. The virtual world is 360 degrees so you can look in any direction you want like in real life. Also, you hold motion controlled joysticks that are like hands in the game. The first day of using the VR headsets we logged in and we learned how to use the headset in an app called First Steps. In First Steps, we are in a futuristic room with a lot of color and objects flying above your head. There is a narrator that tells us what to do and what buttons to press. The narrator tells us how to hold the joysticks, how to look around and do different stuff in virtual reality. The next day we played a game that had something to do with Spanish. At first it was hard because I didn’t know how to tighten the headset so everything was blurry. Eventually I got it to work. Once the game loaded I was on a train talking to a friend that I haven’t seen in a while. The friend was just an AI with everything he said preprogrammed. The VR headset had microphone so I could actually talk which was pretty cool. It felt like I was actually in a Spanish Speaking country. After talking with the AI I got off the train and I was in a train station. The station  was very detailed so it was very believable. Then I walked outside and into a taxi. Sadly I had to stop because doing VR for an extended period of time is bad for your eyes. I think I learned a lot of Spanish and I hope I can do it again before school ends.

Water Bottles

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In this post I will talk about the importance of water bottles.  

Water bottles are probably the most universal, unique, and important tool for any athlete. Water bottles are so important because they can contain a liquid called H2O in various amounts varying on the bottle. H2O also known as water can refresh and cool down your body after a workout. Some people may contradict saying that this is what Gatorade does.(I disagree). Fun fact you need water to survive, that is why having water at all times is very helpful. Another reason is that a lot of water bottles can be reusable so they can go in your very own dishwasher.  What makes something a water bottle is a device that can hold water without it spilling. That means it can be turned upside down. The non reusable water bottles are made of a weak plastic called Polyethylene terephthalate or PETE. Cheap reusable water bottles are made from a tougher plastic.While more expensive ones are made from metal. Water bottles range from all shapes and sizes. See these images.

I think water bottles are highly effective and people should buy them across the world. Buy your water bottles today! 

Sources for information: Olson-Sawyer K., Madel R. “ The Water Footprint of Your Water Bottle.”  Foodprint.org. GRACE Communications Foundation, 17 July 2020, Web. 11 Nov 2022.