GS Portfolio

Welcome back to my blog. This post is for the first Action Project of the Humanities class, Policy. In this first unit, Legislate, our main focus has been on the United States legislative branch of government. The legislative branch is described and introduced in Article 1 of the Constitution and to start the class, we did a little research on that. We also looked at the process of turning a bill into law, making sure to examine every step, and of course watching School House Rock. Following this, we looked at some of the laws that were made by the U.S. government from 1803 to 2001. Keeping up with the history, we learned about the United States' colonialism and its emergence as a colonial power on the world stage. Towards the end of the unit, we began to look at war policies like those made for the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. For each of these different wars, it was important to examine why the United States declared war and what influence it had before an...

 Welcome back to my blog. This post is for the first Action Project of the STEAM class Urban Planning. In this first unit, Load, we have been studying bridges and how they can support different loads. We looked at the four main bridge types: beam, truss, arch, and suspension. Each of these bridge types has its own means of supporting loads. Truss bridges for example can be helpful to support a distributed load. It does this by distributing the forces of tension and compression into its trusses. Suspension bridges distribute the forces into tension in the cables that transfer into compression at the piers. For math in this unit, we learned about vectors, forces, force body diagrams, and Newton's Laws of Motion. For Field Experiences, our class walked down to the Chicago Riverwalk and looked at the bridges that connect the city's North and South sides. Chicago's bridges use the truss design and act as drawbridges. Another FE was a visit by Drew Valentine from GMB Architecture...

Over my junior school year, I have been working on obtaining civic engagement hours. At the start of the year, I was told that I need 200 hours of civic engagement to graduate from GCE. I was asked to try and complete at least 50 of these hours in my junior year. For this school year, I have completed these hours at a few different locations. The first is Elgin's Hope for the Holidays from the fall, and up until now, Chicago Wildlife Watch. In this post, I will talk about the service work I did and my experience with it. Elgin's Hope for the Holidays Leading up to the holiday season of 2021, I participated in a toy drive in Elgin, Illinois. This toy drive was being run by the Salvation Army and I was able to attend because of a family member who works with them. This event works by families signing up to get toys for their children by the time of Christmas for free if they need to. Toys that have been donated by citizens of the community and event organizers can be looked throu...