Project: The Research and Analysis of the inner workings of an everyday electrical appliance

Description: We were given a week to research and write a short paper on how a simple electrical appliance worked by using what we had learned during the electricity unit. We then shared with our peers and discussed what we learned.

Paper: Here

Criteria Met:

Communication and Collaboration: 

I respond to the work or ideas of my peers in a way that is compassionate and productive. 

This project had two parts. For part of it, I researched my own electrical device and presented it, and the other part was me listening to the other people’s topics and what they’d learned about the device they researched. I listened to the other 3 people’s ideas in my group, and I responded by asking them questions to provoke further inquiries, as well as commending them on their good work. If they had any questions about my presentation, I made sure to respond in a respectful and productive way that would answer their question but not make it seem like I was belittling or talking down to them. 

I constructively build upon or synthesize the ideas of my peers. 

When I was listening to the other people present their projects, whenever I had any questions, I would ask, and then further add to their project by make connections between all the other appliances if there were any similarities that I noticed. I also had to synthesize all the information that they presented me with, and make sure I understood all the presented facts and features. This was a good way for me to work on my skills of synthesizing and building upon information.  

Research and Information Literacy: 

I go beyond google and use databases to find scholarly research sources. 

I discovered quite early on that the sources just on google were either too basic and didn’t cover the amount and depth of information that was required for this project to work, or they were way over my head and were using terms and principals I didn’t understand at all. To compensate for this, I went on “Google Scholar”, which is a free database that has a multitude of different “scholarly research sources”. I actually ended up finding the patent for the toaster on google, which had a handy schematic and description of how a toaster is built and how it functions. 

Digital Citizenship: 

I ethically use content that is not created by me by using Creative-Commons licensed audio, video, or images and by properly citing these resources within my work. 

In the criteria for this project, it was required by the teacher that we used diagrams of our everyday electrical appliance in our explanation of their inner working to make it easier to comprehend for the other members of our group. Due to this fact, I searched through google and google scholar to devise the most effective images that I could use to convey my point well, while not distracting from the overall presentation. Because I used images that were not created by me, I cited the sources where I got the images, to further protect the copyright laws and practice citing sources.