A Bridge Full of Gravity
Hello and welcome, first and foremost, I do want to acknowledge what a weird time we're living in. While COVID-19 is still ravaging the world, GCE has begun online classes for probably the rest of the year. It has been a huge struggle for people to adjust to this new way of learning and interacting. It's been even harder for people who have lost their jobs or are on the frontline fighting the pandemic. I would like to acknowledge our essential workers for all of the work and dedication they are putting into fighting for us. I also want to thank the GCE staff for being so helpful and supportive during this time, thank you for everything.
Now let's begin the first AP (action project) for my class, Urban Planning! So far, we have been reading the book A Devil in the White City and discussing the important and architectural history of Chicago. We then began to expand our discussions on what urban planning is and what bridges have to do with urban planning. We have also been studying free-body diagrams, vectors, the law os cosines, the law of sines, special right triangles, heron's formula, and more ways to find the area of a triangle. Now you may be asking why a lot of what we've learned has to do with triangles, I did too. Through investigating bridges we learned that triangles are the strongest and most structurally secure shapes because they can spread out force and weight without slanting. Surprisingly even though we're going through a pandemic, we were able to go on an FE (field experience), kind of. Our teacher, Adam, bravely stepped into the desolate streets of downtown Chicago to show us the architecture of Chicago, putting an emphasis on Chicago's bridges! We also watched a play called School Girls or the African Mean Girls through the Goodman Theater online!
Now that we're done recapping, let's get into what this AP is all about. We were sent a kit from Adam with popsicle sticks and white glue and asked to build a truss bridge.
PHEW, wasn't that a long ride?! I really enjoyed this AP as it allowed me to have something to work on during the quarantine and was genuinely really fun to work on. I enjoyed the research process and finally putting the research into action when building my bridge. If I were to do it all over I think I would have used less glue because I DUMPED glue onto the joints and had to wait for milenia for it to dry which made building the bridge in a timely manner fairly hard.
Now let's begin the first AP (action project) for my class, Urban Planning! So far, we have been reading the book A Devil in the White City and discussing the important and architectural history of Chicago. We then began to expand our discussions on what urban planning is and what bridges have to do with urban planning. We have also been studying free-body diagrams, vectors, the law os cosines, the law of sines, special right triangles, heron's formula, and more ways to find the area of a triangle. Now you may be asking why a lot of what we've learned has to do with triangles, I did too. Through investigating bridges we learned that triangles are the strongest and most structurally secure shapes because they can spread out force and weight without slanting. Surprisingly even though we're going through a pandemic, we were able to go on an FE (field experience), kind of. Our teacher, Adam, bravely stepped into the desolate streets of downtown Chicago to show us the architecture of Chicago, putting an emphasis on Chicago's bridges! We also watched a play called School Girls or the African Mean Girls through the Goodman Theater online!
Now that we're done recapping, let's get into what this AP is all about. We were sent a kit from Adam with popsicle sticks and white glue and asked to build a truss bridge.
PHEW, wasn't that a long ride?! I really enjoyed this AP as it allowed me to have something to work on during the quarantine and was genuinely really fun to work on. I enjoyed the research process and finally putting the research into action when building my bridge. If I were to do it all over I think I would have used less glue because I DUMPED glue onto the joints and had to wait for milenia for it to dry which made building the bridge in a timely manner fairly hard.
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