Term 1 Week 3

Mr Tan does not come (he told us beforehand) for the whole week. One of our Science lessons is turned to English and the other we have a relief teacher. The relief teacher just gave us a worksheet and told us to complete it; nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Conclusion: Not much Science learning today. But...

We have just learnt about our Independent Studies subject. All the marks for this subject are based on a Project Competition (Gulp). If we don't get a C6 for this we can't be promoted to Secondary 2, meaning once you're project goes bust, you're over! My group members are Tan Zi Yuan, Kyaw Khant Zaw and Xu Ziqi. For the Project Competition, there are 12 categories, 4 of which Secondary 1 students are not allowed to do as we supposedly do not have good enough research skills yet. The categories are: Cat 1-experimental, Cat 2-Non-experimental, Cat 3-Inventions, Cat 4-Resource Development, Cat 5-Creative Arts, Cat 6-Language Arts (English), Cat 7-Language Arts (Chinese), Cat 8-Service Learning, Cat 9-Mathematics, Cat 10-InfoComm, Cat 11-Future Trends and Cat 12-S.T.E.M (something to do with engineering Science). We are not allowed to do cats 1,2,8 and 12. After sitting for the assembly talks for all the different categories available to us, we finally decided on Cat 3, as the only ones we were actually interested in were cats 3,4 and 11. For resource development, we felt that it would be too simple and useless, thus quickly discarded the idea. For Future Trends, we knew that we would have to tackle a big topic to get a good mark, and we felt that we had no right to be debating problems that others had and have been debating for the last few decades or so. 

After brainstorming, one of our group members (Xu Ziqi) thought of an idea. People often face the problem whereby they mix up their drink bottles/cans/cups among themselves and refuse to drink each other's drinks. To solve this problem, we thought of using acrylic resin/latex (material used for scratch cards, e.g. in lucky draws) and paste it on the cap for people to scratch their initials/a symbol representing themselves so as to differentiate their drinks between themselves. After some research,we found that this kind of material was easily and cheaply available and for sale and could be painted/pasted on a surface.

For our design to work, however, we first needed to test the material for its durability and how it reacts when exposed to conditions bottles/cups/cans are sometimes exposed to, such as its resistance to scratching, heat, cold and wetness. Thus we designed some tests to test these factors. We also plan to do a survey to search on different people's opinions towards this problem.

After we met with our teacher mentor, we found that there was still one more step to do. We had to document our progress (Mr Tan who is both our Science teacher and IS mentor said it was something he had to do on us) as we worked on the project. He gave us "the 6 thinking hats", a step by step method to solve problems, and to use this template. Thus in future when I discuss with my group members on Google Docs I will have to copy chat to a Word Document and save it (lots of spam as well from the others). This is the only way I can think of to document our discussion.

Wonder what is in store for us in Week 4...