9/20 WEDNESDAY

Today we started to show our Hyperstudio presentations. The Hyperstudio program is a unique way of presenting material to a large audience in a fun and exiting way. With this program you can incorporate video, audio, still pictures, and computer animation. All the groups that presented did a wonderful job on their presentations. At the end of each groups presentation they told the rest of the class what they had trouble on and also what they had learned, that they didn't know before.

My groups presentation was a trip to the Bahamas. Working on our story board went pretty fast because we agreed on many ideas and did equal amounts of the presentation. As a part of our program we scanned in a picture of a plane with land in the background. We didn't want the background so we imported the picture from our disk and we replaced the background with our own by changing the color of all the pixels. Pixels are little dots of color to together that make up the picture. We changed the color of the pixels to make it look like the plane was just in the air.

9/21 THURSDAY

Today the class split up into three groups. A third of the class was sent to find information on how to build a steam box. A steam box is a box that has steam pumped into it to soften the wood that is placed inside. You place the wood in it so that the planks are flexible so that they don't crack or snap in half when you go to form the board to the mold. After the wood has been molded it will be placed on the boat frame and secured there.

The second group was sent to work in the shop to sweep and move benches. A couple of students had to mud and sand the dried mud down smooth so that the walls can be painted later. Mud is a compound that is used to fill cracks and nail or screw wholes in the sheet rock. Mudding is a process of applying the mud to the sheet rock.

As for the third group, the lofting group, built the lofting platform that is thirty two feet long. Lofting is a full size drawing of the boat in three different views. The three views are the front, the side and the top views. When they were done they had to prime and paint the platform white so the lofting team can graft and draw the views of the boat.

9/25 MONDAY

Today we had our Monday meeting to make our schedule for the week. Mr. Gaudet suggested that we use three hours on Thursday to do a lofting exercise that he had planned which would take a long time to set up and get started. He also suggested we take the first hour of sixth period for academics. At the end of the meeting we decided to go down the list of names to choose the person to runs the meeting for the next Mondays meeting.

9/26 TUESDAY

Today we worked on our academics for the first half of the sixth period and the second half and all of seventh we worked on the mini lofting exercise. The process of doing this is first you make a graph on the floor or large paper then you take the measurements of the boat and graph them on the paper. Then you connect the dots with the natural curves of the wood that you are using. The mini lofting was seventy percent smaller than the original size so that we all could do some lofting and see how it was done.

At the beginning of sixth period Mr. Gaudet showed the class a Power Point presentation of the history of whaleboats. This included how they were built. He told us that whaleboats where made cheaply because most of them didn't come back from their trips so they only cost eighty-five dollars back in the 1870's. His presentation was excellent.