"Significant Learning" Short Documentary"


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I really like engineering because I like technology. I feel like when I engineer, I get to create my own things that I can share with everybody. The point of the project was we wanted to teach people how to care for pets, so we decided to make a game that we would program ourselves.


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Last year, we made boats made out of cardboard and packaging tape. Our goal was to float a group of people inside cardboard.


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My most significant learning experience this year was working on a solid state amplifier. I chose to do because I thought it would be a great challenge for me to tackle, and also because I just love music. I like making sounds. I also love just plugging music in, playing guitar. Reading the schematic at first was crazy. We didn't even know like what was the first steps.


We're doing a project where we're using all of the skills from all of our classes to create a business, which is a food truck. So we came up with the the idea of Reel Delicious, which supports cultural understanding through food and film. We started a Kickstarter campaign, and we set to raise $35,000 which, after 45 or 50 days, we got all of our money. And so we have our truck which is parked out in the parking lot. Now, we're just trying to start up the business and be able to serve out of the truck.


We're learning the chemistry behind foods. We're learning entrepreneurship skills, cooking. This project has been really significant because it's really taught all of the students a lot about business skills, talking to professional individuals, and really being able to connect with our community.


The community side of it would be learning about the music and the sound that comes from it. The physics side is actually putting the thing together, learning about schematics, learning about resisters.


During the project we learned about density and mass. First we had to all weigh our entire group together. And then we would see big our boat has to be and how strong it has to be to carry all of us.


 I just loved it. Facts that you could make your own game, really just struck me. I never thought I could program before, and so when I became to code. I was like, oh wow. I can make this, I can make that happen. I can just use my imagination and do whatever I want.


I would say the most common reaction were people were just really surprised. At first when they think of it they're like, oh, so you're just starting the project, and then you're just gonna hire a chef to work in it all the time? And then when we actually explain that all of us students got our food handler's permits, and we're all gonna be working in the truck, they're actually really impressed that students can actually pull off starting their own businesses. I mean a bunch of 15 year olds. That's pretty cool.


No one in anywhere that I would think of would actually make their fourth graders potentially sick. It was just a really fun experience, and we got to learn a lot of things. And most of the time, you didn't even know that you were learning.


If you just tell them what to do, and you say, let's say what's one plus one? And you give them the worksheet, they're not gonna learn very much. They're just going to put everything down on paper and they're just going to forget it the next day. Let them be kids when they're little.


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