Through a course of hundreds of years we have had a glorious yet destructive item, known as plastic. It is a durable material which is made from oil. It can be made into almost anything, from cups to cars. It is extremely common, and we even think that we could dump it anywhere with almost no consequences, but is that true?
Plastic is everywhere, which proves how reliable, cheap and popular it is. It could be used for packing, making anything inside a cardboard box safe from scratches or marks. And although people do say that oil is running out quickly, and it will be scarce sooner than we think, plastic doesn’t have much to do with that. Plastic only uses about 5% of oil in the world every year. It can’t hold anything, of course. A plastic bridge or a plastic skyscraper just couldn’t work, but as these things take years to make, and their materials are very expensive, it’s understandable why something as cheap as plastic wouldn’t be able to hold the weight. Plastic could also be used for transport. Plastic is lightweight, but strong with the right manufacturing. With it being light but strong, it is a perfect recipe for cars, to make them fast, durable and resistant to weak blows. Relating to its packing form, it can easily carry your shopping for only 5p most the time. You may complain that plastic bags break too often, but what do you expect for something that is 5p? Plastic is also extremely useful for power cords, as electricity cannot travel through plastic.
But, of course it has its disadvantages. Plastic probably has the biggest effect on the ocean out of everything it may damage. Plastic litters the street, the beach and most importantly the ocean. Plastics never break. The may decompose, but they only become micro-plastics, which is still dangerous to the environment and the sea life. If a sea creature eats a bit of plastic, it could harm its organs, and if it has children, its children would also have plastic in its body. Micro-plastics have this same effect. Plastic that is too big for an animal could either choke the animal if it tries to eat the plastic, or the plastic could get stuck around the animal, which could prevent it from eating, moving or it could tangle around the animal’s throat and choke it. If we eat something that has eaten plastic we would also be eating plastic, as fish can’t digest it. It’s not as dangerous for humans as it is for fish, but would you like to eat plastic?
In the end, plastic does have lots of benefits, and to stop using it altogether doesn’t seem like a good idea due to the amount of it we use and somethings would be impossible without it. But we should be wary on how much we use and what we do with our plastic and only use it where it is really necessary. Throwing it away is not a good idea and we should recycle as much as possible, and if people try to do things such as beach cleans to try to get rid of as much plastic as possible, I think we can live with plastic sustainably.
For the School Christmas Fair we got into teams and had to design a company, adopt roles and do market research to make products to sell. The process of making all the items, cakes and everything else took 2 weeks. We had a budget of £20. The first thing we did was get into our roles. We were each assigned to the roles we would be good at. Next we had to make our team name/logo. We made our name “The Merry Marauders” and our logo was a gingerbread man.
There were also things to do with the STEM club. There was a simulation of the great pacific garbage patch. We were shown a video about a large net pulled by a boat that went to the great pacific garbage patch to collect as much garbage as possible. Some of us went to try and make something to collect as much of the stuff inside the simulation of the great pacific garbage patch as possible. One of the designs was a bunch of pipe cleaners with beads on them on the handles which would make it float. Then it would be pulled along to collect as much rubbish on the surface as possible.
A computer engineer is someone who writes codes/debugs a computer. Debugging is the process of identifying and removing errors from computer hardware or software. The code in the computer is a language which the computer understands and will follow the commands given. The computer needs commands to have the ability to do anything. If the computer didnt have commands, you wouldn’t even be able to switch it on.
Each Thursday for 6 weeks we go to Bowmore and we go in the swimming pool. P5/6/7 go to the pool and we go up and down the lanes and do different this like backstroke or front stroke. When we go in the pool we play a warm up game at the end we do some different things like the mushroom float or the pencil float. After we have done everything we get a 5 minute time play around in the water. After the 6 weeks, we have a swimming gala. We really enjoy getting to do swimming for PE.
The robots were made of Lego but they had a device on them. The device was what made the robots do what it was programmed to do, a micro processor. We had to get a computer then make programs on it. We had to add settings on an app on the computer then make it move forward by clicking a arrow facing forward and then add more setting and click on a stop button to make it stop.
into the computer and the other into the robot. We then had to press a button on the computer to transport the programs onto the robot. Once the robot was programmed you had to take it to a race track to get it tested and if the robot passed the test, you can go onto the next challenge. The next challenge was to make it go forward then go backwards for 3 seconds. We had to make a new setting on the computer which had a backward arrow on it and then make it go backward for 3 seconds by clicking a button and writing 3 seconds down. We then tested it out again on the race track and then we got another challenge.