Category Archives: Thinking

English 9 Final Reflection

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Artifact

Persuasive-Essay-1Download

This is the file of my persuasive essay I wrote on why philosophy should be taught in high school.

Curricular Competency

In this assignment, I was able to develop my speaking and communication skills. I had to present this essay in front of the class, and I think I did well. I practiced the speech until I had it memorized, and I was able to deliver it. The more I practiced my speech the more confident I got. This helped me grow my communication skills.

Core Competency

During this assignment, I grew in the thinking core competency. To be more specific I improved in the critical thinking competency. When I was writing my speech, I was brainstorming ways to make philosophy appeal to my peers. Once I had finished brainstorming, I came up with the idea that students didn’t like topics that required memorization, and philosophy has 0 memorization in the course. Now that I had my point, I had to find a way to prove it. Again I had to brainstorm, and I thought of doing a poll. A poll would’ve been great, but I didn’t want to bother people in my class, so I thought of doing it online. This turned out to be a huge success, and is how I used critical thinking to solve my problems.

Core Competency Self-Assessment

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Artifacts

Videos:

Rube-Goldberg-In-Motion-1-f3dadf8be63f77cbDownload
Rube-Goldberg-In-Motion-2-8d08e436a8e9268cDownload

Pictures:

Start of machine
End of machine

Core Competency:

During this assignment I used the creative thinking competency. When building something like a Rube Goldberg machine you need to be able to use your imagination, and then solve problems to turn your imagination into reality. For example, we needed to create a bell, because our machine’s goal was to make a bell noise. We didn’t have access to anything bell like, so we had to start thinking. We started off with making a cup with a marble inside to make a rattle noise, but that didn’t fit our goal. We brainstormed together to figure out what to use, and we came up with using a weight and a metal stand. This worked very well, and brought our bell idea to life. As you can see in the videos, the bell makes a clear noise. This is proof of our creative thinking being applied into the project. We also used some critical thinking skills to figure out a way to generate power for the weight to hit the metal stand. One strategy we used to come up with new ideas, was to grab an assortment of items and just play around trying them out. In the pictures above you can see that we have very different items. Shown by the pictures, our strategy made sure we wouldn’t have to use track the whole way through the project (there was a limit to amount of track you could use). While doing this one of my groupmates found a hotwheel launcher that we ended up using in our final build. We used lots of creative thinking during this project, and I personally found it very fun. I think the Rube Goldberg project involved all the core competencies, but the thinking competencies stood out more to me than the others.