Nolan Menchaca
Quality Essay
During my 11th grade year in high school, there were many qualities and attributes that I grew in. We have five qualities at DRSS that we strive to incorporate into our everyday work. The qualities that we focus on at DRSS are communication, collaboration, creativity, persistence and inquiry. These five qualities are well emphasized because we believe that these qualities have a big impact on ones work not only in school, but also in their everyday lives. The quality that I grew in the most during my 11th grade was communication. Communication is a very important part at DRSS. We have many group projects, which means it is very important for us to be able to work well together to produce quality products.
We have had many projects that have challenged our collaboration and communication skills. One projects that challenged and helped my growth in Communication was the Ferris Wheel project in our Algebra 2/Trigonometry class to show our knowledge of angle measurement and radians. For this project, we chose partners, and then we had to create a physical or virtual model of a ferris wheel with an equation that could determine a rider on the ferris wheels distance from the ground at any given time during the ride. Along with the model Ferris wheel we made, we also had to write a report that included the equations, the location we chose, how the velocity affected the visitors ability to enter and exit the Ferris wheel and information about the carts that we designed for the ferris wheel. The location we chose was where we would place our ferris wheel and why we wanted to place our ferris wheel in that location.
One artifact from this project that shows my growth in communication is our final Ferris wheel model. Lee and I chose to create a virtual model. We created our model in a 3D design software called Autodesk Inventor. We chose to use this software because we have prior experience with this software from previous projects. Although we had used this program before, we faced many problems when we created our Ferris wheel model. When we would use this program in our previous class and projects, we had to create a more simple design. The Ferris wheel is a lot more complex and has multiple parts that had to connect together which is where we faced our problems when creating our 3D design. One of the biggest problems we faced while creating our ferris wheel was making all the 3D parts the correct measurements so that they would fit together properly. Lee and I divided the work evenly which meant I would design half of the parts and Lee would design the other half. Since we designed the parts separately, there were a lot more chances of incorrect measurements and the parts not configuring together properly. This happened with the main wheel and the frame after we constructed them and tried to assemble the parts. There was an incorrect measurement on my part when creating the frame and that is why there was a problem. This artifact shows my growth in communication because of how my partner and I worked together to develop and solve the problems we faced during the production of our ferris wheel. The way we solved this problem was asses where the incorrect measurement was and work together to fix the design so that they would assemble properly. Lee and I were able to work together to fix the measurements so that the frame and wheel properly assembled.
Another artifact from this project that shows my growth in communication is the final equation we created to show a riders distance from the ground at any given time during the ride. This artifact shows my growth in communication because creating the equation was a difficult part in this project. Lee and I both had a difficult time understanding the equation because we had to use the trigonomic function sine in our equation. We did not know that we were supposed to use this function in our equation at the beginning of the project. This caused us to have a difficult time developing and equation because when we did produce an equation, it did not work properly to determine the distance from the ground when on the Ferris wheel. We solved this problem by researching different possible equations and we asked different groups that had already created an equation. One group understood the equation so they were able to explain how to develop an equation and taught us the different parts of the equation. We were able to work with another group to develop an equation that accurately represented a rider’s distance on our ferris wheel at any given time during the ride.
The final artifact that shows my growth in communication is our final report of the Ferris wheel. Many components were included in the report. These components consisted of the location we chose to place our ferris wheel, how the velocity affected the visitor’s ability to enter and exit the Ferris wheel and information about the carts that we designed for the Ferris wheel. We had disagreements over certain components. One of these disagreements was determining how the velocity of the ride affected the rider’s ability to enter and exit the ride. I thought that we should have had the Ferris wheel stop so that the rider was able to exit then the ride would continue. Lee thought that we should decrease the speed of the ride so that it would just continuously spin and the rider would walk on and off as the Ferris wheel was in effect. We were able to discuss our thoughts of this topic and we concluded that having the ride continuously going would be the best decision.
Click icon to download Ferris Wheel Report
Throughout this project, we were faced with many problems and these artifacts show how we were able to communicate effectively to overcome these problems. Improving this skill is very beneficial because I will often have projects that I will work in groups. It will be extremely important to be able to work well with any group member to produce quality work and products.