Final Words...

Have you ever had that endless feeling of accomplishment that just makes you want to jump up and down for 5 minutes strait, and, even though you had the same amount of energy in the ending as you did in the beginning, it still wasn’t enough? Well that is exactly how I feel with this project, and let me tell you why…

At first I thought this project was going to be a piece of cake. I thought all you have to do is find a small problem, and do some calculations, and solve it using physics. At the most, I thought I was going to put in about a few hours of work to create a solution. But I was wrong.

After really taking the time to think about what Ho’oulu ia Kamehameha was really meant to do, I realized that we aren’t writing a report or doing a project that we can just forget about after we are through, but, rather, we were making a physical or tangible change to our school that will be seen by administration and the student body. After deciding that we were going to make a bench, I realized that REAL people will sit on the bench – REAL PEOPLE who will judge, vandalize, and sit on the bench.

I thought it was phenomenal what Mr. Blake was doing. He managed to disguise using necessary skills for the future, such as teamwork, time management, communication, problem solving, creativity, and presentation, in a project that also helped to make Kamehameha a better place. He also disguised using physics in our project because most of us didn’t even know how to incorporate physics at the time of thinking of our project.

I really thought that beginning of construction went well because all of the team members were present, and we had a set process of doing work: Max, Nicole, and I went in during our free periods to work together and get the bench done ASAP. However, the road became bumpy after Max left. At that time, we finished constructing the bench and began the polishing process. Unfortunately, all the free periods I had didn’t overlap with Nicole and Kipa’s, so I felt the need to go in on my own and do majority of the work. I felt so pressed for time that I had to ask some of my friends for help. Even if this didn’t go as planned, this project was still a success because the good times weighed out the bad.

The good thing was that we pulled off a pretty good presentation, but even after having a few timed group practices; we still went over the time limit – “grossly” over the time limit. But in our presentation, we got to express how the final product was a success. The bench looked pretty darn nice, if I may say so myself. And after all that hard work, I hoped it would look exactly that. We put a lot of hard work into this project, whether it was depending on each other to do daily blog posts to writing a 10-page report. And even if there were a lot of rough times, for example, when someone didn’t turn in the presentation or did a blog post on time, the project was worth it because it gave us a taste of what the real world is going to be like.

This project is a revelation, and I hope that one day it will be turned into a separate class instead of a physics project. This class could pull in concepts learned from math, English, and science, and at the same time, teach you how to communicate with others. Other than life skills, it could possibly teach you other skills, as I learned how to use a drill, how to paint, how to use an impact, and how to use an electric sander. I think it will be better if the class raises money somehow to serve as an additional fund for the project. But other than that, this gave me a taste of real life, and gave me an upper hand for the future because I have all of this experience to help me.