HI! Im so happy that this is the end of the year and that we got our final done before finals week:) My over all thoughts for this project are that this was benificial to everyone. We not only tried to solve a problem here at Kamehameha but we learned how to do in depth research, communicate with adults who we need help from, present it, blog about it daily, how to be resourceful, sustainable, and about team work. I though it was a great experience for everyone even if some of the projects were a fail. Some things that didn't go well was the our of class room work. The bin took longer than we though it would to make and the wood shop was so far away so its not like we could easily walk back and forth from class to shop when we needed. Another problem was not always having all of team members here or working on our project with us and that it take a while for things to compost. Things that went well was we hit all of our deadlines, thanks to Darcy:P And we got our project out in the wild and its working:) Another thing that went well was our project was helpful to not only us but to Mr. Hutchison as well. I learned a lot of thing. I re-learned how hard group work can be and also the benefits of working in a group. I learned a lot about composting with worms and the different things that need to be done in order to house worms and keep them alive. I think i would change the presentation times and maybe the date to a school day because boarders have things to do on the weekend and its not always convenient to spend like 5 hours one night on this project. I think we were doing science even if we failed because science is about trying and failing and seeing what works and what you can do next time to improve. This is definatley science because didn't you say everything we do is science? here is a picture of our poster board and of us stressing the eff out.

http://www.youality.com/what-you-need-to-have-a-successful-startup/

Over the past quarter in this class, my group and I have learned and experienced many things. I know that I haven't done as many blogs as the rest of the group. But I believe that the few posts that I did, were very well done. Through this project, our group has helped out Kamehameha Schools. The entire physic class, as well as Mr. Blake's other class, has helped out Kamehameha out in many different ways. Our group specifically helped out through the idea of being sustainable. By doing a worm composting bin, our group showed Kamehameha Schools that you can reduce and reuse what we didn't need at the time. I think that over the past week leading up to the final presentation, was the most stressful. We had to finish the power point, we had to finish the poster boards, we had to rehears, we had to do the final paper, and we had to do a final blog post. In the coming weeks, we had many trials and tribulations. The final week of the project we came together as a group and worked really hard to get everything done. I think that this project should be done again in the future. I believe that all the groups, especially our group has learned to love this project. This is a great project to do and you'll learn a lot from it. All in all, I think that this was a success.

My last contribution to this lovely blog

    

SOURCE: http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/archives/2008/Jan/

        Hello everyone :). I am here to give my last goodbyes to a project as unique as the teacher. I thought this project was completely different from any high school experience I have ever had, but hopefully future students of Kamehameha won't think that as time goes on. It was unlike anything I've even come across in school, where the students actual make the change and not just complain about it. Although, there was some bumps in the road for every group, I think this project was necessary and educational. Although admin might say that it 's not teaching us concepts of physics, the students are getting hand on experience with the real world and how change is perceived by many different people. Overall, it was a great project that taught us the bigger picture of physics instead of the small ones that we would've forgotten two weeks out of school :),
        Some of the things that went well were implementation, design, proposal, and brainstorming. These four elements of our projects went relatively fast and smooth without much conflict. However, the things that didn't go as planned is the construction time, construction manner, blog posts, and results. The construction aspects just took longer than expected and we had a few needed nuts and bolts for construction. However, since the amount of dirt and worms we had were minimal we were able to rotate with only one clasp. The blog posts were kind of infrequent and the results turned out smaller than at first predicted in our proposal.
       I learned a good deal about worms and their role in composting as well as composting as a whole. I also learned large amount about hydroponics and sustainability from Mr. Hutchison. I learned about cooperation, teamwork, troubleshooting, and leadership from my fellow group members and Mr. Blake. So, overall, it was a very educational experience filled with hard work, discipline, and "getting down to work".
       This project is pretty awesome, but if I could change anything I would ask for the A.C. to be turned down in the auditorium because I was literally shaking and freezing my butt off, even when we were speaking.  I also think that blog posts should be every other day with the schedule so that we only write on days we have class because most of the time we didn't do anything on the odd days anyway. However, other than that it was a complete success in my eyes.

        I certainly felt like we were doing science this past quarter. The whole theme of worms, decomposition, producers, and nutrient production (food break-down) brought me back to biology and the construction was all physics baby. Our project consisted of much research and experimentation, which was science in general. So, I think that, we have undoubtedly been doing science. Whether it was strictly physics or not, we need to learn application and the molding of all the science together like such in the real world. Physics is all about application into realistic situations, which is what this whole project was about and therefore everything is science related :).

http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/archives/2008/Jan/

Final Blog Post

This project was unique in every way imaginable. I have never had a project where we had to solve a problem on such a large scale by applying what we learned throughout the year in class. Typically we would never get the chance to apply what we learned in the classroom in the real world. There was a lot that each of us gained from this project because we were able to learn how to work in real world environments. It gave us all the chance to learn, grow, and become sustainable problem solvers that will gear us for the future. As a private institution that has pledged to produce good and industrious men and women I feel that opportunities such as this should be offered to students who are ready to take initiative. Hopefully these students who take initiative will maybe be able to solve some of the issues that our Hawaiian people face in the current era. At the start of this project I thought we would never get our composting bin to fully function. However through hard work and planning we somehow managed to construct this bin and get it fully functioning with worms. Creating compost took much longer than I had originally anticipated but as the saying goes "good things don't come easy." One problem that became a nightmare for us was our lack of bolts to fasten our latches and hinges to the barrel. In the end we got them fastened securely and our composting bin is ready for operation. I feel that our composting bin will go a long way in helping Mr. Hutchison in the future with his club or might be class. Every step of the way we were able to make Kamehameha a more sustainable institution. In the future I hope this project continues because there is always a problem to be solved and no matter how hard it is to get approval from administration it is always worth a try. If this project cannot be continued in Mr. Blakes physics class I feel that this project should be implemented in a separate class that could maybe join forces with Mr. Hutchison and be called "The Sustainability Class." Together it could create the good and industrious men and women Pauahi desired as well as spark the creation for leaders of the future.

ONWARD HO!

A picture of the future home of our worm bin :).
We know that our compost will be put to good use
here and contribute to the education of the future
students of Kamehameha.

I think that our symposium went really well! We had our exhibit board set up in the lobby with some adorable worms and pictures. Our final powerpoint was ready by the time we got there filled with useful pictures and we were ready to present just in time for the symposium to start. It was kind of a stressful afternoon especially with the social, which was really good by the way, but we were able to pull it off. We were fourth in line to present and we kind of antsy and worried about our presentation, but it turned out pretty swell. Our powerpoint was beautifully finished and even though we had a few miscommunications here and there throughout the presentation we all felt it went quite swimmingly for our group. We are going to be donating our bin to Leilani's D.A. sometime this week and hopefully all will go well in the composting. We would just like to give some major shout outs to some important people that made this project and blog all happen: Mr. BLAKE, Mr. HUTCHISON, Ms. FUJIMOTO, Mr. OMO, & All of my group members for all of their contributions to this project. Lastly, good job to all those groups out there for their fantastic job at the symposium on Friday!

Fingers Crossed

We are hoping that tomorrow goes swell. We have yet to rehearse the powerpoint and we still need some pictures for the presentation, which Leilani is going to supply. We are finishing up our presentation and adding some requirements that we missed. Our bin is still functioning behind Leilani's dorm. We are going to input the data tomorrow and practice and assign slides for each member of our group. We also have to finish up our written report over the weekend. Leilani is going to try to finish up the exhibit board for our symposium tomorrow where we will be rocking the aloha wear. Composting is going smoothly and we're just hoping our presentation does as well!

Oh My Goodness It's Wednesday!

One of our hard workers :)

We're down to two more days until the big presentation. We are finishing up the presentation tonight and tomorrow and then we are going to rehearse on friday. We planned to wear aloha attire and hopefully our exhibit board will be ready for friday night. We have some results and conclusions to add to our visual presentation, but other than that we are pretty much done. I might change our Google presentation to a keynote however, because Google is giving us issues with adding pictures to the presentation. So, we are probably going to end up switching the presentation because it's too much of hassle and we need our pictures in the slides. On another note we finished our written report draft. We basically used our detailed design as a base for our report. We just added some paragraphs in construction, implementation, reflections, and conclusions. We also expanded and edited the rest of our paper to make sure it makes sense with what we are adding to the paper. Our paper is pretty good, but we need to expand a little more and add pictures to the report as a whole. We are well on our way to finishing this project up. However, we have a lot of practice to do before we are ready for the presentation on Friday. Hopefully everything will run smoothly till then...