Water Desalination Project- Test 1

On Thursday we had two full solid hours of work time to work on any project that needed to get worked on in either Andrews class or Spencers class. For my group we decided that we were all going to work on The Water Desalination project. We started by gathering what we had already acomplished and what we still needed to put on. For the most part we had the piece assembled and ready to go, besides a few minor details. Once we got out there we basically sat around trying to decide how we were going to put the plexy glass on top of the wood without having it on there permanently. I felt that we wasted way to much time trying to decide that when we could have simply just duct taped it down and tried that out.
We decided that we were just going to put the piece of plexy on top of the boards and put a little bit of watter in there to see what happens to it. After about twenty minutes of waiting nothing really happened to it and we had remembered that on the bottom of the wood there was a whole that had not been sealed up so this was completely throwing off our trial. Throughout all the two hours this is pretty much all that we got acomplished. I really felt that we could have done a lot more but it didn't happen due to us goofing off some of the time.

Thursday Movie

On Thursday Spencer was leaving early so we had a hour in Andrews and a hour in Spencers. During the time that we were in Spencers class we watched a movie which was about the Rwandan Genocide. This movie was about how it all started up and the ending of the genocide and a few of the main things that happened during this period of time. The movie named a lot of important people that took on main rolls through this genocide. We would watch half of the movie on Thursday and the other half on Friday. I wasn't there on Friday so I didn't get to see how the movie ended.
We were given a piece of paper at the beggining of the movie which had questioned about the movie. We would have to pay attention to what was going on or else we wouldn't understand the process and important dates that were in the movie, and we wouldn't be able to answer the questions that were on the paper for us to answer.
Since I am already Rwanda I pretty much had already known what was going on in the movie but I also learned a lot of new things that I didn't already know and this movie also enhanced some of my knowledge on what i already knew.
For the most part I liked the movie even though I wasn't able to see all of it. I liked the way that it described every point in great detail and it was very informative. I was able to take in a lot of great information, and I would have loved to seen how the movie ended

Friday work day

To begin the day off we started with Andrews class and discussing what we would be doing. Luckily we got a chance to do some building on according that next Thursday we would be doing our first trial run so we needed all the time that we could get to get some building done. Andrew said that on Monday we would get both of the periods to work on our prototypes. On Thursday we were assigned to look up peoples names who were assigned to us. We were allowed to work on that or to continue working on our prototype during second period in his class. We got the majority of the cutting done that we had to for the sides, back part, and the holding tank done. We still have quite a bit of work on our hands still, but I think that if we work really hard we should have no problem getting the prototype done by the due date for it.
In Spencer's on Friday we started off by doing a second draft on our papers that we had written and already peer critiqued the week before. We would pass our papers to two different people so we would get twice the amount of feedback on what they thought while reading our papers. Once we got back the papers we stapled on the sheets that the people had written on and filled them out, and we would staple our first and second draft. These would be graded as if they were finals but would be able to get another chance to re write them if we didn’t like the first grade we got. After we finished that we got into our book club groups, and we began to talk about the sheets that we had filled out. We discussed what pages we were going to read up to for our next book club meeting. More towards the ending of class we were assigned to do a slide show project on our country. We were given a small piece of paper describing what had to be on the slide show. Over the weekend we had to research those topics on what was on the paper.

The beggining

Last week in Andrews class the whole team would get a full solid two hours two work on our water desalination or water purification systems. This would really help us out a lot because we have two prototype test and one of them is coming up soon, so we have to have something ready to present. Our group began to bring in materials on Wednesday so if there was anything else that we needed than we would be able to have them by Thursday which would be the day of the building. On that day we would have two hours to build and get anything done that had to do with mainly the building process. My group got some of the work done but we should have gotten some more done so we wouldn't have to much left to build. We got one of the sides up which took us the full two hours. Personally I think that we could have gotten a lot more done had we have been on task better. I felt that through some of the time that we were working we didn't really work to our full potential. I think that I could have stayed on focus during the building process instead of getting off task and messing around when i should have been working. For the most part I think we did good with getting the first side up but we really should have gotten up the second. I think if we can manage to stay focused next time then we will have no problem with getting things fully accomplished.

Interview

The person that we decided to interview was from Uganda, who later on in his life left Africa and came to America. He was always fleeing different places in Africa mainly by foot. He was born in Uganda but later there were problems that came about and he fled to Ethiopia, and then from there to Sudan, and then to America. He had a family so he wanted to find a steady place to stay because he would always have to take his older sun and his baby and his wife on extremely long walks.

The interview took place during school hours but at an African Alliance place where they help people coming from Africa get started in America. They help them find a job a place to stay and the other necesities. We first were introduced to the person who started the African Alliance. After meeting him we met up with one of the people who had actually left Africa and then came to America. There were five people in a room total, four of them being the group memebers including me, the other being the interviewee. We were in a smaller room with a video camera and one of the group memebers being the person who would be wrtiting down the material. Having both a camera and a note taker would make sure that we would get down everything that he said.

I really like the whole expierence of talking to someone who was actually there and getting a first hand expierence. During the time that we were interviewing him there were times where I couldn’t believe that he actually had to go through that. I remember one of the times where he was running away from soldiers and said, “I was running away from the bullets so fast it was like I was a bullet”. There was one time where I felt sad because when he was about seven years old his younger brother died at a young age beause there was no medical care to help out his brother and the nearest hospital was a couple days away.

When we were going into the place where we would be doing the interview I wasn’t nervous because I have done an interview with another woman for a different project and when I was doing a job interview over the summer. We had started to plan out the questions about a week or two before the interview so we would have a good ammount of questions ready. On a few of the questions that we had asked really led us into further smaller ones and ended up being able to have him answer them for quite some time.

From this interview I have been able to improve my skills in the way I write questions and make sure that I am able to get a lot of information from just a few questions. This was a great learning expeirence and I wouldn’t mind doing another one. How this changed my thinking was of how if I was going to research papers and other things I could always try and find people to interview.

Spencer & Andrew Friday class

On Friday we worked on our exeter problems for Andrews class. We worked in our table groups so if we had any problems while working on them we would be able to ask our table mates for help. If they weren't able to answer the question then we would be able to ask Andrew for help. We also learned new concepts and got a homework paper on them. We took down some notes on the new material and had time to work on the homework. We were required to have 1-10 of the exeter problems done by Friday when we got to math class. Since we got the problems late we got some extra time to work on the problems so we were allowed to have over the weekend to work on the problems.
On Friday in Spencer's class we started off by working on some warm up write ups. After we had gotten that done we finished reading a paper that we had started talking about a day or two before. We had written down some questions and then would see if they would get answered in the reading. Once our teacher had finished reading the paper to us we discussed what we had thought about the reading. Since our movies were supposed to be due Friday our teacher decided to give us some extra time to finish and gave us to the end of Monday. We had gotten the rest of the day to work on our thirty second movie, and finish any recordings that we had left to do for the mini movie.

Water Purification

On Thursday night all of our group members were assigned to look up different water desalination, or distillation systems. During the time that I was looking on different websites I found one that was called Solar Water Distiller. How this worked was the water would be held in a chamber and the sun would shine through the glass hitting the water. There is a reflector on the back side of holding tank so the sun would hit every spot heating it up more.
When we got to class the next day everyone suggested their different ideas that they had found from the day before. When it came to me everyone in the group liked the idea. We decided that would be our main one and do some more research on it. This purification system is a reliable one and is easy to maintain.
http://www.thefarm.org/charities/i4at/surv/sstill.htm---This is the website where I got my information for my water distiller