Persistence is an important quality used every day at STEM. It means for us to keep going, no matter what, always trying new strategies and improving our work. In STEM Foundations, we use it a lot in projects we do for other classes like science and health, etcetera. We work on our projects in SF (STEM Foundations) sometimes because of the way we use PBL at our school. PBL means project based learning, which is a learning strategy where we use projects to learn the curriculum. So if we need to implement something new into the project, we are forced to do the learning and research so that we are able to accurately complete the project requirements. Whereas at other schools, they learn everything from text book readings and use a project as an after-thought, it isn’t as important. We are also taught how to keep trying at our projects in SF, like I said earlier. I’ve become a lot better at persisting this year.

 

Like I said, I have grown a lot in persistence this year due to STEM Foundations. At the beginning of the year I was really lazy and I never wanted to take the extra step to make the project better or the best, even though my classmates did. I would just sit when I didn’t know what to do or how to make things work and my partners would keep working at it until it was perfect. Our projects are supposed to be creative so to make them more creative we have to persist the whole way through and keep making it better. There has been one project where I really saw myself moving forward with this skill and growing. That project was called, The Plate Tectonics Project, which was a science-STEM Foundations integrated assignment.

 

During the Plate Tectonics project we had to make a model to show tectonic systems at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This model had to be 3-dimensional and be able to move. Before we started building our model we used a digital modeling and animation program to create a digital version of what we wanted our model to look like, when we finished we had a 3-D, moving version of our model. In Maya we learned a lot of skills before we started animating and modeling. Some things we learned were perspective, camera views, the x, y and z axis, and how to navigate the system. The perspectives and camera views are just different ways of viewing your project, rotating around to see it from different angles. The x, y and z axis were the different directions of movement across the plane, x goes left and right, side to side. The y axis is up and down and the z axis is the 3-D effect, it goes closer and farther away from the screen. We translated, rotated and scaled the model to make it proportionate and have it work together properly. When we first started working with this program, I was very confused by the scale and how to move things to different places and just make it work. When I got frustrated I just checked out and let my partners do it because I just told myself I couldn’t do it. After a while I just got tired of sitting around and I started to try harder. I started asking questions like “How did you make that move that way?” or “Can you show me how you figured that out?” I started trying to understand the program by clicking round and using all the different tools and I didn’t give up until I had made the shape do what I wanted it to do. By the end I had a solid understanding and I made some changes and added some things to the model in Maya. I learned to keep trying even when I failed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can see in the picture that the model has complex (for us at least) shapes and sizes. We had to animate the top black/gray part to spread out across the top. Also there is an orange triangular prism that stretches throughout the whole shape. On those shapes I had a lot of trouble with the scale (or size/dimensions). I couldn’t figure out how to make one side bigger without making the other or moving the triangle into the exact middle of the rectangle. I grew because at first I couldn’t get the right dimensions but by the end I just kept experimenting with the scale and moving the shapes across various axis and I eventually got it right. I had confidence in my work after that which led me to try harder and be more persistent.

 

Another time I felt I was persisting was when we were actually designing our model before we made it on Maya. When we started we had no idea how to convey the ideas of the MAR in the model. You can see in one of the images that in our original design was strange and flawed because if we had a big strip of magma emerging from the top and just going back down it would seem misleading. As we learned new things, we made new drafts, trying to fit out model to the location and how it worked. You can see the design drastically change between just 3 pages and the basic fundamental factors were greatly altered. We kept thinking of new ways to model the processes at the MAR even when it was challenging, we worked together and we kept working even when nothing else made sense.

 

Like I said in the beginning, persistence is a very valued skill at STEM and I use it a lot in all of my classes especially STEM Foundations working on projects. I can always use this skill in the future because I’ve learned that every year gets more and more difficult than the last so I know I will have to use persistence a lot in my future at STEM. Also at jobs, I’m not always going to figure things out on the first try, you have to work for things you want in life. That is why I am very glad that I keep growing in this quality and making improvements to better myself.