Unschooling Journal January 17-23, 2021

by | Jan 24, 2021 | Blog | 0 comments

This week, I did a LOT of coding! I also kept doing my swimming, violin, and taekwondo classes. I also went to nature school this week. I learned about the product rule in calculus, and I’m planning on making a video! The hockey games started (yaaaay!), and so my dad and I watched.

Here is me going to nature school. I made a marble track made of bark and wood, and used marbles that my teacher brought. Story from nature school: Mink was excited to have all of her group members present for the first time in weeks, and we took this opportunity to focus on group team-building and problem-solving for the day. We revisited our group flag and the final group member had a chance to add their name, after which point we added fun decorations and pictures to our creation!
Upon arriving at toadstool ridge, everyone was excited about a spontaneous bout of shelter building! We did this for a while, and kept the natural building energy going through a team building activity that we did for most of the afternoon. Mink separated the group into three sub groups, and each group had a goal of creating a track, or course, which had to to roll a ball from the top of toadstool Ridge down to a specific point in the bottom. We learned a lot about surface tension, as our balls inevitably got stuck in the rough terrain. Harvesting a large sheets of curved bark off of fallen hemlocks proved to be instrumental in making our tracks work. All of the tracks crossed each-other at different times, which meant some of us had to build highways or jumps that went over each other’s tracks in order for all the groups to succeed. While we didn’t exactly finish this challenge, it was a great exercise in communication and teambuilding (sic), as well as working around each other and with each other to reach a common goal. Overall, it was a super fun day and we definitely made the most of the fantastic weather!
I watched a webinar on SelfDesign about coding. It wasn’t that interesting, as they just kept talking about things I already know about, like if-else statements. They also talked about the history of coding, which (surprise!) I already knew about too. But, the class helped me think about the things that people are developing right now, such as self driving cars and robots.
  • I learned about Young’s double slit equation. Young’s double slit equation is the way to figure things out about the double slit experiment, such as the distance between the two slits.
  • I learned about single slit interference, because it was the next thing in the physics course.
  • I learned about tsunamis, just to find out what they are about. I was studying waves (from the double slit experiment) and I remembered I want to learn about tsunamis, and so I found this Ted-Ed video about it.
  • I did my violin homework.
  • I learned that the derivative of e^x is… drumroll please……….e^x !
  • I also learned that the derivative of Ln(x) (natural log of x) is…. another drumroll… 1/x!
  • I learned about derivative rules, telling you about adding and multiplying them.
  • I I learned about the product rule, a way to multiply two derivatives of functions.
  • I learned about the proof. COMING SOON: Video about the proof (and more…)
  • Here is a sneak peek at the video!!!
  • I started watching a series of videos on YouTube called “Essence of calculus.” It’s basically about learning about calculus without all the “memorizing of formulas” and finding an intuitive way to learn calculus. This channel is called 3Blue1Brown, and I’ve known about this channel for a few years now (Great animations, by the way). I was looking up calculus on YouTube, and this popped up!
  • I did Brilliant every day of the week, This was about finding angles in a few triangles.
  • I did some coding in algodoo! Did you know that algodoo uses coding? My mom sure didn’t :). The language is called Thyme.
  • Here is another view about what I am making. This type of marble race is called a marble seige.
  • I wrote a bit of python code that calculates the golden ratio using the formula 1 + 1/x, just because I wanted to see if I could do it. I got inspired to do this from another program I saw online.
  • I wrote a bit of javascript code that calculates the golden ratio using the formula 1 + 1/x.
  • I made a 2048 game on scratch, still in progress though. I am good at the game, and I am playing with my mom!
  • I learned about Error-correcting algorithms, this one is called the Hamming code. I was looking up coding on YouTube, and the same channel (3Blue1Brown) popped up about the Hamming algorithm.
  • I learned about Palau for my CIATCOTW (color in all the countries of the world) project.
  • I created this form for my book club members, asking what they are like (ex. how old are you, what do you like to do, etc.) There are 26 questions!
  • I created a tsunami simulation.
  • In algodoo, because I was learning about tsunamis, and I wanted to make a simulation about it. I used algodoo because I didn’t know any other simulation softwares, and algodoo makes it easy to simulate.
  • AAAAAAAAAAA

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