The Improved Palmer Square

For this unit called "Flow" I was assigned to choose a neighborhood and improve its surroundings or the neighborhood itself. In this unit, we learned about different cities and how their cities are built and why. We learned what is good and bad about our city and what is urban planning itself and how that influences in our city and neighborhoods. I chose Palmer square in Logan Square because it's a huge park in a walk-able area. I am most proud of completing my model on time and choosing this area in my neighborhood. The most challenging about this action project was improving the place I chose because it's so big.

The five improvements I chose to add in the neighborhood was:

• Benches 
• Skate Park
• Gated Park
• Water Park
• Basketball Court

The reasons why I chose these improvements were because Palmer Square Park is extremely huge and filled with trees, path ways and plenty of beautiful grass. The middle section of Palmer Square Park has sort of a play area for children and the rest of the park is open for any activities. Since there's a lot of free space I decided to put a basketball court on the left side of the park. A skate park by the children's playground with benches. 

The Circuit

In this unit "Power" in Urban Planning we learned about two types of circuits. Parallel circuits and a series circuits. We also learned about electricity itself, electrons, magnets, static electricity, Tesla and Edison. I was assigned with a partner to build a parallel circuit with five resistors. My partner and I created a parallel circuit with a motor, main switch, two resistors and a speaker. We were also told to choose household appliances for each of the resistors that our circuit had. I am most proud of getting all five resistors and completing my prep worksheet. The most challenging part of this action project was to make a parallel circuit. Enjoy!

Bridge

For this action project, urban planning I was assigned with a partner to create a bridge with inspirations of the bridges we had took a look at in our FE. We learned about different shapes and angles. We also learned about Newton's Law of Motion, Law of sines and cosines and vectors. The bridges we looked at were truss bridge, suspension bridge, beam bridge and Arch bridges. What I am most proud of is getting my bridge, sketch and the mathematical portion done on time. The most challenging things was building my bridge and getting the math part together. I am proud of the research I did, in order to understand how bridges are made and also to build the best bridge possible.

My partner and I were inspired by the truss bridge we had observed. When building our bridge we used triangular shapes because we learned in class that triangles are the strongest shapes. As I built my bridge I had some difficulties with gluing the sticks individually onto the bottom cord. The reason why I had some problems was because I didn't make a triangle that overlapped the Popsicle sticks.