Skip to main content

My 24 Hour Woodworking Challenge

Welcome back to my blog! This post is for the first Action Project of the Humanities class, Endurance. In this class, we have been learning what it means to endure. We looked through history to see moments where humans endured, such as Ernest Shackleton's survival in the Antarctic and the Holocaust, while we read the book Night by Elie Wiesel. We also introduced small challenges we would have to endure, like holding an ice cube in our hand for as long as possible. For this Action Project, we have been tasked with committing 24 hours to a challenge with a clear mission and guiding question. My mission for this AP was to build and improve my woodworking skills and create something that is important to me. My guiding question was, what is the best bridge I can build? For 24 hours, I worked toward creating a wooden bridge by myself with only a small amount of woodworking experience behind me. While working, I recorded my progress by taking photos and filming time-lapses. The video below shows my journey over those 24 hours, and I have also journaled each hour of work in the document below. I hope you enjoy watching my video.

24 Hours of Endurance, GS, 2023

Sources and Thanks:
1. Hours 1+2 images from: The Crucible
2. Music: Sunset Vibes (Lo-Fi/Chillhop) by 23843807 from Pixabay
3. Special Thanks to:
    - my parents for shopping and assisting me with the assembly
    - my teachers for providing me with materials and guidance

24 Hours of Endurance Journal, GS, 2023

I hope you enjoyed watching my 24 hour, bridge building journey. Working on this Action Project was a lot of fun and I definitely improved on my carpentry and sketching skills. The bridge is important to me because it represents my experience throughout my 4 years of highschool. I think learning how to use saws and drills is useful because they can be helpful for small fixes or creative projects and do not require much time to learn. When I started this AP, I tried to plan ahead to account for as many possible problems that I could forsee so there wouldn't be any time wasted. But I was faced with a few small and large challenges and those large ones stressed me out because I felt like I wasn't prepared to overcome them at all. Even though I did not finish building my bridge in the 24 hours, it will be completed in the future and I may even do more work on it such as installing a winch system the makes the bridge rise and stay up. Thank you for watching and reading, and I hope to see you in the next post.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Redesigning Chicago, One Neighborhood At A Time

Welcome back to my blog. This post is for the third Action Project of the STEAM class Urban Planning. In this third and final unit, Flow, we focused on how cities and urban areas have developed over the years. We first learned about how cities have always been centered around trade which has always relied on transportation and studied different modes of travel over the years that all contribute to urban planning. We took some time to learn about eminent domain which is something the state can use to claim private land from a private citizen for its own use if it has a strong case such as public use. We then looked at INVEST South/West, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot's community development initiative to reverse disinvestment on Chicago's South and West Sides. This initiative is trying to bring together multiple city departments, community organizations, and corporate partners and so far the city has aligned more than $1.4 billion in public and private investment. We then moved on...
Post a Comment
Read more

Diddley Bows: One-stringed guitars

Welcome back to my blog. This post is for the second Action Project of the STEAM class: Light, Sound, and Time. This unit, sound, was all about how sound is made and what happens for humans or animals to perceive it. Sound travels as a longitudinal wave and is explained as vibrations coming from a source that we perceive to be sound. To start, we examined how the human ear worked and our range of audible frequencies compared to infrasound and ultrasound which humans can’t hear. We then looked at the speed of sound and how it changes based on the medium it travels through. Following the understanding of how sound travels, we investigated traveling faster than the speed of sound or breaking the sound barrier and also the Doppler Effect. Lastly, we looked at stringed instruments like guitars and found how they make sounds. We also had one Field Experience at Guitar Center to look at the guitars and other instruments there. For this Action Project, the task is to create a diddley bow which...
Post a Comment
Read more

What is your Carbon Footprint?

This is the last Action Project of the Fuel class for STEAM. This unit focused on chemical reactions, carbon emissions, and inequalities. This unit was very short compared to the other two but still enough time to learn everything we needed to get to. When working on the chemical reactions we talked about how certain molecules reacted to from something else. The main molecules we worked with were oxygen (O2), carbon dioxide (CO2), and water (H2O). Since the unit was only a couple weeks long there was not much time for Field Experiences so the only one that we had was going to a water cooling facility in downtown Chicago. Here we learned about how this plant cools down water for nearby buildings by using ice. I thought this FE was really cool and it was interesting to hear about the projects that they did and how they got them done. A lot of their work when connecting their water to the buildings involves large pipes underground which can be a difficulty when in a busy city. One of thei...
Post a Comment
Read more