So far in the last three weeks, I have met with my mentor three times. We have established a schedule in which he will come over to my garage after school and we will work on the boat until dinner. I have also made regular progress with making my remote-controlled boat. 

Since my last blog post I have added the sheers to the side of the frame and have finished cementing the boat

together and to the building board. I have also learned some boat-building terminology such as frame, sheer, kneel, and bulkhead.  

While this progress report is mostly positive, I have encountered one main issue so far, the wood breaking. To help the glue cement to the wood better I decided to put weight on the sheer in order to keep the part together. Unfortunately, when taking this weight off I noticed that one of the segments of the sheer had broken into two. This Is not a big problem as all we have to do in order to fix it is to line it up and then add epoxy. This was likely due to a weak spot in the wood rather than the weight we put on the boards because all the other places we weighted worked out fine. 

Things that went particularly well during our mentoring sessions were communication and problem-solving. I think these worked well because of the way my grandpa was teaching me. It usually worked like this, he would explain how to do the task and would then watch me do it so he could be sure I was doing it right. After this, he would then join in and help finish the task. This is a highly effective teaching method as he was able to correct me before I had the chance to repeatedly do the same wrong thing. 

 We also communicated effectively if we had a problem. For example, in our most recent meeting, one of the instructions was asking for two pieces that were not listed in the instruction kit. Because of this, we spent most of the meeting talking about possible solutions and what could have happened. We ended up deciding that because the kit included two extra 26” long wooden parts we would cut one of them down into the 12” parts we needed. 

To hold myself accountable for the learning I am always asking about how a particular part fits in or how two parts go together. If after these questions I do not understand something, I will not hesitate to sit down with the instructions and the plans and look at them until I understand the information completely.  

Thank you for reading, 

Ben