Communication is one of the 5 Qualities. The 5 Qualities are 5 words that every student strives to be like at the Dayton Regional STEM School. The 5 Qualities are Creativity, Inquiry, Collaboration, Persistence, and Communication. Communication to me is talking through problems with others to create something or effectively explain something. I was never really all that swell at getting my point across. At one point in the beginning of the Plate Tectonics Project (PT Project) I tried to communicate to my partners that I wanted a bowl shape in our design. They had no idea what I was talking about and thus, the inside joke, “You’re talking bowls to me” was born. The joke essentially meant that what the person was saying didn’t make any sense. I never heard the end of it. But as we grew closer and understood each other more, we knew what the other was talking about without any problem. We only used the ‘bowls’ joke for people outside of our little group who didn’t know how to communicate their ideas properly. We also fought a lot, and grabbed things without permission because ‘the other person won’t be able to do it correctly’. You can see why this is a problem. Over the course of my 8th grade year, I feel I have grown in communication.

You can see in my STEM Foundations notebook (SF notebook) that we had many ideas. We thought about two blocks separating, but that wouldn’t have worked because that’s not how it is in real life, eventually, we got the final idea for stretching the crust. You can see all sorts of drawing ideas and sketches. We discussed together using a dry erase binder and marker how we wanted certain ideas to look and drew them down in our SF notebook. Of course, early on in the project, each idea had certain problems and we didn’t know how to solve them. Once we had an exchanging of ideas with other groups, we worked with different designs. We listed pros and cons for each idea and ways to solve the cons. Once we had settled on an idea we started on our MAYA model.

A MAYA model is a digital 3D representation of our physical 3D model. Basically, it’s a computerized model made in a 3D program. You can make sorts of things in there and professional animation designers use just the same software (not all of them, obviously, but a bunch). We started our MAYA model barely knowing how anything worked, with a brief explanation of how everything worked. We had to make triangles in our model which was difficult, but we talked together about different ways to try and do it and we asked Ms. Poppaw, our STEM Foundations teacher. STEM Foundations is class to prepare you for the future by focusing on skills such as organization, collaboration, etc. You work on big projects in this class and it’s very important for young students. We had trouble with making it move but we tried different ways and talked it out. Like making a cube and cutting it diagonally in half, and editing it by dragging out the vertices to where we wanted them. Vertices are the points at which each line on a shape connect; the corners essentially. Without vertices, there wouldn’t be any shapes, because the shape’s lines can’t connect. A cube is 3-dimensional square, like a box. In MAYA you can also do a thing called reflecting. Essentially, it works like this: pretend the line of reflection is a mirror, you simply just reflect it so it is the exact opposite of the original. Select a shape and click the reflect button and your line of reflection. Then the program automatically reflects it for you. Once finished and turned in, we moved from the MAYA model to our prototype.

Of course, we also used things like dry erase markers and surfaces to help our planning and plotting. It was a very helpful tool to immediately be able to erase and draw easily.

With our prototype, arose new problems. We didn’t know how to solve them so, once the critique session rolled around, we asked engineers or other people who had experience with what our project was doing. They gave us several ideas like using Velcro and we applied them to our final. We communicated fluently with each other and other people. Thinking back, at the beginning, we couldn’t have done that. This is a sign of growth.

Without communication, we wouldn’t have been able to work out our problems. We wouldn’t have been able to decide what to do. At the beginning of the project we were fighting and snatching things from each other’s hands. This isn’t very sportsman-like and if we were good communicators we could have just communicated our point across without snatching. At the end we were a well-oiled machine. I think this was due to mine and their increased growth of communication. I think MAYA and dry-erase markers really helped us communicate our ideas to each other better. Without these tools, I have a feeling we would never have achieved what we wanted; a good final, and great communication. With practice, we were able to improve in communication.