GS Portfolio

Over my freshman 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 freshman term. For this school year, I have completed these hours at two different locations. The first would be Misericordia which offers the potential to persons with developmental disabilities and who is physically challenged. The second place I gained the rest of my civic engagement hours was at Sunshine Gospel Ministries. In this blog post, I will talk about the organization and what I did to help and gain my required hours. Misericordia When I was volunteering at Misericordia Home which is in northern Chicago I spent my time in the bakery and shipping area. The majority of my civic engagement hours came from volunteering at Misericordia which would be a total of 38. When working in the bakery I would be cutting brownies and...

For Final Presentations this term I am presenting the GCE Minecraft server. The GCE Minecraft server is a multiplayer world on Minecraft where me and a fellow freshman have built GCE. Since we were not able to conclude our school year at GCE and it being the last year at the current location, we decided to make a replica in Minecraft. During the terms pre-apocalypse a few GCE students took interest in creating multiplayer Minecraft worlds like surviving as a group to beat the game and even building a massive city. As we moved through the weeks after GCE closed its doors the students continued to play and collaborate with each other. One of these students came up with the idea of building GCE. I agreed to do it because I have a passion for Minecraft and have become an architect on it just like the creators that I take inspiration from. When there is something you enjoy, do more of it. So, in the mindset of the Final Presentations for this term and having a little bit of fun we sta...

The spring term at GCE has come to a close and this is the final Action Project Posted for this school year. This post is for the third Action Project for the class Food in the STEAM course. This Action Project was all about our position on GMOs. In this unit we learned about the different methods of plant breeding and environmental impacts on some of our agricultural production. We also covered a lot of genetics and probabilities to see which genes would be dominant or recessive in genes. This action project had to include our own opinion on GMOs. From this we would create our own, small debate. The side that I chose for this AP was against GMOs. This AP also needed a couple graphs that showed some data based off of our arguments. For this project I wrote out my debate which will be shown here including all of the graphs and a video presentation of it. When Justin Dammann goes to plant corn in his 2400 acre farmland he will sow plants grown without genetically modified seeds. ...

As the end of the spring term comes to an end so does the school year. This blog post is the final one for the Humanities class in my freshman year. It is also the third and last post for the class Food For Thought. This action project took place in some little time and not so long after the previous AP for this class. In this unit we have studied the different methods of farming and we watched the documentary Food Inc. In Food Inc. we began to learn about the industrial production of food including some of the negatives and positives that come from it. We learned about how food has changed and what different ingredients are in food and what the are in our food labels. In this unit we also has a small taste test of different foods we found in our kitchen and how to describe them by not saying they are just delicious which would be very useful in the action project. This action project focused on how to determine whether there is a difference in taste between organically and non-organic...

Welcome back to my blog. This post is about the second Action Project from my Food class in the STEAM course. In this unit we worked on some math such as variables, exponents, and conversion factors which would become useful for the action project. Leading up to the AP we created a couple kitchen experiments. Our first experiment had to do with leavening agents. We created a "porridge" that was supposed to be similar to making the first bread that our ancestors had made for food with seeds. After creating the porridge I added a banana which could help bring bacteria to the "porridge" so it can rise. The second experiment involved changing emulsifiers. In a brownie recipe we changed eggs with a banana and created two tests. The first test had all the usual ingredients and the second one had the replaced emulsifier. After baking we found the banana test was a different texture than the original test. For this AP we were asked to use a recipe of our choice and replace ...

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 the second Action Project of the Spring Term at GCE Lab School  so far but the first in my Food class for the STEAM course. Like the AP before this for the Food For Thought class, this was all done at home due to the global pandemic. This first unit was very interesting. Not only was it a new experience by not working in the classroom but we were learning from a new perspective. In this unit we talked a lot about agriculture and natural farming. We read a lot of One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka. We talked about companion planting and what plants work well together and their symbiosis. We also learned how to test soil using a soil solution and macronutrient test kits. This AP was about making our own container garden. We had to create a design of a garden that we would use if we had more space and resources also utilizing what we learned about companion plants. With my small garden space I planted a handful of the seeds that were mailed to us...