Swimming with Hougang Care Center Final Reflection

(LO 6 Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance)

Time flashes, we are approaching the end of this service. Over the year, our members had quite a good time. From basketball to volleyball, from Zumba to boxing, both the members and students were enjoying the sessions with harmony. Friendships are established among the students, among the members and between the students and the members. No matter the weather condition is good or bad, there are always around 10 of them who come every day. Most of those core members enjoy either playing balls or chill in the water. Some of the students always chat with the members chilling in the water by the side to make sure they are not left out. Misha and I always invite those who would like to play with us.

Though almost a year of interaction, we are already quite familiar with the members. We all have a general understanding of their conditions, hobbies, personalities. In this way, we can offer extra care to them so that they would have a better experience. All of us work in unanimity to achieve our common goal. The students work cohesively and our supervisors were really responsible for helping and guiding us on the way. Giving always feel better than taking. I feel really honored and satisfied by returning the welfare that society has provided me back to itself with the efforts of the whole team. Swimming with Hougang Care Center is one of the most meaningful services I have done and it will have a long-lasting influence on me.

Pictures: The venue of the service — Infant pool; and our equipment.

 

Water Polo Club Final Reflection

(LO 4 Show commitment to and perseverance in your CAS experiences)

Water Polo Club is probably the most interesting sports I have tried before. It is like a combination of swimming and basketball. This sport may sound easy and simple, but actually it is much more energy consuming than either swimming and basketball. For swimming, you are floating naturally and just need to extract a force pushing you forward. But water polo requires you to fight against most of the gravity all the time only with your legs. Considering the fact that we also need to aim and throw the ball hard, keeping our body stable all the time is important. Your legs are literally like a propeller of a helicopter. My legs are so sour after 5 min of propelling, and it feels much worse than running a 2000 meter, cycling for 50km, or after 2 hours of tennis.

Although this is quite challenging, it is a really fun activity and both the teammates and the coach Ben are really friendly. I had a great time during this activity and hope to do it again next year.

Intermediate Reflection for Swimming with Hougang Care Center

(LO7-Recognise and consider the ethics implications of choices and actions.)

Working with people who need special care is always associated with different ethical issues. This is because biologically speaking, they are special people, but socially, ethically or politically speaking, they are normal people just as anyone else. This results in a complicated method when working with them—care, understanding, and respect. The first thing that is associated with this is that we need to be really careful about how we call them. When we are referring to them we shouldn’t use ‘clients’, which may hurt their feelings and confidence; instead, ‘members’ is a much better word choice in order to remember them. Beyond that, the way we are chatting with them also has great significance. Even though some of them has disabilities to understand and respond to our chat properly, I still tried my best to pretend that they responded correctly and nodded with a big smile on my face to show my respect and interest to their responses. In this way, I managed to both entertain them and offer respect to them. Last but not least, when we are taking photos of them to keep a report, we always ask them whether they allow photos or not, and we do not take any photos if they would not like us to. This helps maintain their privacy and freedom of decision.

In conclusion, we gain so much experience in dealing with making decisions associated with ethics. From this service, we’ve learned that our minor choices and actions can have a great influence on other people’s feeling, especially those who need extra care from us.

Photo: The photo list that reflects our respect for their privacy.

EE day reflection

One thing I’ve learned is that the strategy of conducting EE is to start off broad, but end up with doing an experiment which is being simplified to a limited amount of constants, and broaden and deepen the subject with more complicated relationships.

I am proud that I have done enough research to conduct the experiment and establish a model that is optimal for real data collecting.

I am going to finish writing the rationale of my experiment and start doing primary experiments collecting both the real data (attack angle with lift to drag ratio) and the simulator data (all the shapes and lift to drag ratio).

Initial Reflection

After brainstorming a lot of topics that I can do on physics, I finally pinpointed on researching the efficiency of airfoils since I am really interested in aerodynamics and the design of aircraft. At first, I was trying to focus everything on the wings of airplanes, but my supervisor and I found it too narrow. Therefore, we extend the topic to the whole realm of airfoils which can be extended in the areas of helicopters, fans and submarines. At the same time, in order to narrow down the experimental part, I will be collecting data only about how the shape of the airfoils influence its lift and drag properties. Also, for a more doable experiment, I decided to use a triangle airfoil shape and only change the position of the maximum for my primary data collection, and use simulators to find out the optimal curvature for the airfoil as secondary data. This discussion clarified the structure of my EE.

View on the mass shooting in New Zealand

My topic is based on whether this man should receive a death penalty. According to the local law in New Zealand, the death penalty is not legal because of the country’s tolerance towards criminals. Whether he is receiving the death penalty or not is still under discussion. He murdered those Muslims because of the lack of tolerance, but if he is eliminated, there is also an intolerance towards a far-right extremist who may hold his own value system and ideologies. On the other hand, murdering more than 40 people with a pure intention of racism and religion discrimination deserves a death penalty. So this would be a quite tricky problem for the New Zealand  politicians to solve.

Final reflection for DJ Club

(LO4-Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences. Students can articulate the stages from conceiving an idea to executing a plan for a CAS experience or series of CAS experiences)

After 3 seasons of consecutive training, I finally felt confident enough to try performing in public events. However, this idea is not easy to execute, a lot of planning is needed before the performance. In the end, hard works pay off, the performance was successful. Check the video reflections to see how I prepared for the performance.

Video reflection part 1 

Video reflection part 2

 

Water Polo Club Initial Reflection

(LO 5 Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively)

Although I attended the water polo club for only one season, it was an amazing experience because this is the only activity that I shared with my close friend — Wangdrak. Because we are familiar with each other, we can work together closely.

Water polo is a sport that requires strong cooperation and communication in both practice and matches. Because we are beginners, we started with passing a ball continuously with a single hand to each other on land. We have to synchronize our movement to catch the ball on time. As we gradually move further apart from each other, it becomes much harder to keep the ball in air. We later found out that to do this more easily, we need to read each others body movement to analyze when he is going to throw the ball, what direction and what strength. In this way, we can get prepared to move in advance. After a few classes, we got into water. It is much harder as we now need to keep ourselves floating in the 2m-deep water while passing the ball. Since we need to keep balance in the water, the catcher may not be ready to catch the ball since he may be adjusting his position. So before I throw the ball, I need to check whether my partner is ready or not. Here, the importance of communication is illustrated. Since it is not convenient for us to say anything as there is a risk of chocking water, we can only communicate through hand gestures: one hand up means I am ready, while both hands underwater means I am not ready. This worked very well. In the following practices, we need some further cooperation as we were swimming while passing the ball and aim to shoot on a goal in the end. Because there are defenders, we need to be in good positions to dodge the defenders. As a result, we discussed strategies before every training.

All the training above cannot be done without working collaboratively and the communication between us. Later, we will be working with a bigger group of people when we joined the teams. I believe that the skill of cooperation would be more crucial.

DJ Club Intermediate Reflection

                                    

Picture: a) arrangement of the songs with different pitches b) Circle of Fifths/Fourths

(Learning outcome associated: LO1, Identifying own strengths and develop areas for personal growth.)

It is like practicing calculation to improve maths, listening to a great deal of music is also fundamental to the DJ club. Fortunately, I have been listening to electronic music since I was in grade 7. As a result, I have collected a massive playlist of music that can be used well in the DJ club. However, when I decided to put all these songs together to make a playlist, I found out that only some of the songs go well with each other. So, I did some research on the mix in keys and found out that there are only some tones that go well with a specific tone. Then I came up with a solution: using my perfect pitch, I sort out different songs into different categories by their tones. In this way, I can make a harmonic playlist easier. I teach this technique to the other students and they found it useful as well.

I’m still watching a bunch of youtube DJing videos in order to learn more about other techniques as well. So far I have learned how to trim a song, set playback, loops, scratching. Those cool techniques are very cool and they are really worth to share with the other members. I will continue to explore and learn new methods and teach others.