GS Portfolio

Welcome back to my blog! This post is for the first Action Project of the STEAM class, Economics: Risking Value. As a class with only two Action Projects, this post and another in the future will show off a lot of work completed over a few weeks. In this first unit, Growth, we have investigated the economic and math concepts that would be useful in modeling choices. Throughout the class, we read Freakonomics  by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, which presented economic utilities through real-life examples. We have also explored how incentives can persuade others and affect decisions. Other essential vocabulary words such as opportunity cost, supply, and demand became useful leading up to the AP. For Field Experiences, we met with a Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago representative, who talked with us about what the FED does nationally and locally. In this Action Project, we have been tasked with thinking about plans after graduating high school. We would have to consider c...

Welcome back to my blog. This is for the second Action Project for the STEAM class, Disease. In this class we have been learning about various mental disorders such as autism and OCD. Many disorders have causes that still are not fully known and some diseases do not have treatments. Some diseases are fatal and can be difficult to stop. We have also been looking at the different brain waves that are active during parts of the day. These brain wave patterns could be graphed and calculated with their slope ton find the dominant brain wave at different intervals. To learn more about how people can be diagnosed with certain mental disorders by meeting specific criteria we explored the DSM-5. The DSM-5 is a large manual that explains many mental disorders for the use of medical professionals. In this Action Project I chose to research and do a simulation for Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's is a slow progressing disease that starts with memory loss and gradually leading to the comple...

Welcome back to my blog. This post is about my second Action Project for my Food For Thought class in the Humanities course. This unit was titled Death and we learned about monocultures and polycultures. A large amount of the farming in the United States is a monoculture and they only grow one type of crop. It can be grapes, oranges, corn, wheat, etc. Polycultures can be helpful to the environment because there are multiple crops growing in the area. The different crops can help each other out by providing nutrients or even giving shade to their neighbors. In this unit we also discussed reparations on the Atlantic Slave Trade as well as thinking about what we eat and how it has traveled around before it came to us. The main goal of this action project was to talk about a specific target in Sustainable Development Goal number 2. SDG 2 has been named Zero Hunger. For this AP we were asked to research a civilization that encountered similar problems that were related to the target we chos...

Welcome back to my blog! This is a very different experience for all of GCE since we are all writing our first action project of the term from home. In fact, everything about our action project was done at home including the classwork, tests, assignments, and mini projects. Currently we are all facing a global pandemic which means self quarantining and away from our friends. Through this we have continued to learn and go on with our average school day. This spring term is all about food and this class is called Food For Thought in the Humanities course. The point of this first action project was to create a story of our life if we were a food ingredient that we chose which was from a dish that means a lot to us. The ingredient that I chose for this AP was ginger. One of our assignments before the AP was to interview someone in our family that knew a lot about our family's culture and history with food. I decided to talk with my aunt and we discussed one of our family traditions whi...

The first unit of this winter term was very interesting in the Fuel class for STEAM. We did a lot of talking about energy and different types of fuel. Some of these include the known fossil fuels, natural gas, oil, coal, and also renewable sources of energy like solar and wind. We also watched the documentary Pump which is about people having a choice at the gas pump and being able to decide what fuel they should use for their car. In this unit we talked to someone from Nicor Gas where we found some extra opinion on the use of natural gases and the other fuels we use today. This unit largely talked about fossil fuels and how we use them in our daily lives without even realizing it. We might be getting our power in our home from a coal plant and our car uses gas. Even though we may fill up our cars about once every couple weeks we may not actually think about what is happening somewhere that is allowing us to have this gas. In this unit we also did a lot of graphing and predictions for ...

For the final Action Project of the Water unit in my STEAM class we talked about how water causes weather. We went over sun radiation and its effects as well as climate change. Our Field Experience of this unit was going to the Field Museum in Chicago. The exhibit we were focused on was concentrating on water in art. Most of these photos were from the Jardine Water Treatment Plant and since we had visited there it was cool to see what we saw turn into a nice photo. From there we talked about global warming and climate change with one of the scientists working there. We then began to work on the final project which was a slideshow talking about the average weather and climate of a city of our choice. The city I chose was Wroclaw which is in Poland. In this slideshow we were asked to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius or vice versa. I also showed different effects of climate change and their impact on Wroclaw and Poland. To view my slideshow click the link below. View Presentation Here ...