Alice’s Portfolio – I think you need some Volleyball！

Designing a Story Problem

January 9, 2026 / Alice

In my story, the main context was revolving around an eighth grade math teacher, otherwise known as Ms. Baldwin, and her tendancy to forget about grading homework. The story progresses as Ms. Baldwin forgets and strucks a deal with her students, in hope of no longer forgetting to grade her students homework. The deal included the mutal understanding that every class Ms. Baldwin had forgotten to grade the homework, she must give each student (twenty) a packet of gummy bears. The story goes like this. Meet Ms. Baldwin, the wonderful red g8 math teacher, who was everyone’s favorite. However, she always had this one problem; she never remembered to grade their homework! Her class was enraged, but still supportive, giving Ms. Baldwin an option which was that every class that Ms. Baldwin had forgotten to grade the homework; she owed her class of 20 students 1 pack of gummy bears each. Ms. Baldwin agreed. Ms. Baldwin started with 100 gummy bear packs at home. She knew at this moment she could not waste any gummy bear packs. She took the homework home and left it on her table. When Sunday came, she was getting ready to grade the homework. An emergency message surprised her! Her friend was reminding her about her wedding, that was happening today! She rushed to the wedding which took hours, making her completely forget about grading the homework. When the next class arrived, she realized she had totally forgotten to grade the homework. She handed over 1 pack of gummy bears to all 20 students in her class. Still, she did not learn her lesson. The very next class she had forgotten again, giving her students 1 pack of gummy bear each. Ms. Baldwin knew she could not forget anymore. To stock up, she purchased 20 gummy bear packets. For the next few classes, Ms. Baldwin kept her word. For 3 classes she had not forgotten to grade the homework. During this time, she did not need to stock up on gummy bears as she did not give any out. During this time, Ms. Baldwin gave a project which her students did rather well on. As a prize, she rewarded all 20 students with 3 packs of gummy bears each. By class 8, seeing her stash of gummy bear packs decrease all a sudden, she purchased 40 gummy bear packs over the next three classes (assume she bought the same amount throughout all 3 classes). During this time, her class completely forgot to ask her about homework. Ms. Baldwin was delighted as she did not owe them any gummy bear packs. Finally, as the year was coming to an end, she gave out gummy bears to students she thought were working hard during her classes. For the next 4 classes, students were on their best behavior as she gave out 15 gummy bear packets per class. As the year ended, the gummy bears tradition was stopped, and the following year, she never forgot to mark the students’ homework again. On class 6, how many gummy bear packs did Ms. Baldwin have, and what could it mean in this context?

I am very proud of the progress my partner and I had taken to finish the project. To begin, we overcame little problems, such as distance, by meeting and calling at times, then working together. If I could do this project again, maybe I would challenge myself a bit more with adding more increases and decreases, although that would affect my story overall. I think that with this I will be able to spend more time engaging in the story problem. The story relates to real life and the inspiration was when Bobo made a bet with our Math Teacher related to gummy bears being given if homework was not graded, reflecting how the story relates and is a possible real life situation.

This is a link to my problem.

Alice Zhao – L4 Unit 2 Design a Story Problem – 3759753.docx

Health 2026 WELLNESS COMPASS

December 17, 2025 / Alice

What I value and want to prioritize in 2026.

Unit 3: Identity and Healthy Relationships

December 11, 2025 / Alice

This unit was mainly based on healthy relationship, identity, and how we can carry a healthy assertive relationship. To begin, there are three types of communication in a relationship. Passive, Aggressive, and Assertive. Passive communication is when one individual constantly gives in and “obeys” the other partner of the relationship, which ultimately is unhealthy due to the fact that there isn’t effective communication. For the same reason, aggressive communication is unhealthy. Aggressive communication is where one individual constantly forces the other to do something they may not want to, leading to another relationship without true CONSENT. Assertive communication is communication that is effective with true communication and boundaries set. Speaking of consent, there are ways to identify whether or not consent is truly given to another individual, that we have learned in the span of this unit. When looking for consent, you must ask the question clearly, make sure that the other individual is not peer pressured, and conscious. In the same way, they must also set boundaries with consent, telling them what is alright, and what is crossing the line. Healthy relationships include clear set boundaries, constant ask for consent before doing actions to invade others space, and true, assertive, communication. In addition, our project this unit was to analyze a relationship shown on media that could be widespread known. For this project, my group and I chose Beck and Jade from the TV show, Victorious. For context, the show talks about a school made for those who have talent, whether in music or acting. Beck and Jade are two characters that have constant fights, and in our project we accurately depicted whether or not their relationship was healthy, and how to improve it overall. We believed that Beck and Jade could improve by practicing more effective communication, understanding what both individuals actually WANTED in the relationship, rather than not only not understanding each other, but also fighting. We made our project in form of a video, and a link is pasted below along with a few photos.

https://www.canva.com/design/DAG5wruNB1I/IwBza_2GOhxSOI6qUK-PeA/edit?utm_content=DAG5wruNB1I&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

Language Arts Socratic Seminar Reflection

November 25, 2025 / Alice

The reason I chose this image to display and represent me in my socratic seminar reflection is simply because I think it shows how much I need to improve as an individual during public speaking with a group. I spoke too much over the class average, resulting in a score that shows how I may be dominating the conversation too much, generally meaning that I needed to speak less. Reflecting over this document today, I do understand that perhaps the main reason for my action could be due to how my peers besides me influenced me, as those next to me also spoke a large amount. In some way, it made me feel as if I was speaking a too little amount, as I wanted to fit and match the class average. In this case, I felt as if I was surrounded with those who had many speaking times- however, they had spoke in a less time, causing them to still blend with other speakers. Reflecting over my socratic seminar, if given the opportunity, instead of dominating the conversation to try to keep the conversation moving, I would take small approaches, posing different questions, allowing others to place ideas onto the table instead. Finally, just giving others a moment and listening while building on other individuals thoughts and ideas.

Health Mental Illness Portfolio Post

November 9, 2025 / Alice

This unit I learned many things such as how many beliefs in the real world today about mental illnesses are actually stigmatized perspectives and inaccurate. For example, I used to believe that OCD was a mental illness that was mainly caused by feeling this need to be organized. However, I found out that OCD didn’t necessarily need to be based off of organization, after I listened to the informative presentation of my peers.

Old misconceptions

I also used to believe that anxiety was mainly based off of being a “sad” person, or being “lonely”. This was a stigmatized approach to the illness anxiety, and people with anxiety can look normal to others because many symptoms are internal or can be hidden, while others are subtle and may not be obvious to an onlooker. Anxiety affects a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but the internal mental distress is often invisible to those around them, which is what I learned during this unit.

Surprisingly…

What surprised me, actually, was how much the world believes that the stigma based on mental illnesses are actually facts. Without this unit, individuals like myself and my peers would perhaps still believe these stereotypes.

Now, I do also understand how it is necessary to educate the public about mental illnesses and the stigma. Without this education, the public may still be believing these facts that are untrue, Those who are experiencing them may be under enormous amounts of pressure, further encouraging them to not reach out and discuss this illness with their therapist or other people who can support them.

Semester 1 Active Learner Reflection

October 29, 2025 / Alice

My current goal in science class mainly based on active learner would be to raise my hand more in class to answer question I know. I feel as if this could benefit me as I would be participating more in discussions as an individual, helping me to build on my confidence. Right now, I feel like this seems more as an improvement rather than an achievement due to the fact how I have not done much to improve on this matter.

I am proud of actively communicating with others in group work, collaborating effectively such as hearing everybody’s perspective and thoughts, and always encouraging other to put ideas down on the table. When met with challenges, I am always willing to look for improvement, and would persist to try to succeed or overcome the challenge.

I think the biggest challenge in this class could be actively speaking in class discussions. Sometimes, the environment of the class seems to be a bit stiff or stressful, causing it to be hard to share ideas and showing stress. This would be my biggest challenge, adapting to the environment and welcoming, forming a community where everyone, such as myself, would be willing to speak up.

I think the main active learning problem for myself would be to become a bit less shy as an individual, speak up in class to boosts how I am learning actively. However, this is one of my main challenges, which I want to improve in the next quarter of the year.

Alice_Zhao+Science+Self+Assessment+October+7+2025 (1)Download

Unit 1 Reflection and Goal Setting Math

October 21, 2025 / Alice

I think during this summative, I did the question, “does the order in which I preform this sequence of transformations matter?”

In the start, I was unsure about how to solve this question. However, by testing a different shape out, I managed to solve the question. I think this demonstrates my learning due to the fact that I was able to overcome a challenge that I thought I wouldn’t be able solve. I persevered, solving this question.

Another question could be the critical thinking question. In the beginning, Ms. Baldwin said that this question was wrong. However, after using my critical thinking skills (see what I did there) I was able to explain what the problem was. I was able to receive the correct grade, demonstrating how I am able to effectively communicate with others to get the better grade.

I think I improved this year by learning how to describe a sequence. Before, to describe dilation, (in my pre assessment) I used the describing word “enlargen” with a scale factor of, rather than dilation with a dilation point. I have improved greatly by learning about dilation.

I also learned all about theorems (thm.) and how to use them to describe and prove congruency, similarity. This shows how I have learned different factors that helped me improve throughout the whole of the unit.

I still need to work on not rushing and growing impatient. I am a relatively clumsy person, due to impatience, which leads to me leaving mistakes in my path. This is similar to what I did on the test, which I need to improve on calming down, reading carefully, and not repeating mistakes.

Strengths I have this year could be completing work quickly with efficiency, have effective communication with others, and completing homework on time.

Improvements could be fixing habits, speaking up more in class, or spending more time to work with others.

Next unit, I want to spend more time fixing my bad habit of becoming impatient. Things that could get in the way of my goal could be my bad habit of not reading properly or rushing. If I get stuck due to this, I could take deep breaths (health), or I could contact a trusted adult to help me.

Health: Unit 2 WOOP Goal Baseline

October 8, 2025 / Alice

The app that I chose to complete and accomplish my WOOP goal was Day One, a journaling website that includes a streak, motivating one to journal daily. Besides that, I constantly feel as if writing things down helps to relieve myself of stress. It feels as if I’m sharing my story with someone else, being able to calm down. It provides a place where I can rant to others, where I am allowed to calm down easily. Besides that, when I practice health strategies to get rid of the stress, I am able to record that down, showing how the stress coping strategy worked or had not. My woop goal, in this case, is to have more stabilized emotions so that I decrease being impulsive, against others, myself, friends and family. This will decrease the chance of getting grumpy and snap at others.

In seven to ten days, I hope to see outcomes showing how I have calmed down and can manage my emotions effectively. I want to be more calm during stressful situations, such as tests and presentations, as well as during fights, so that I am respectful and handle it effectively. I also hope that it decreases the amount of impulsive decisions. This means not choosing what seems great “in the moment” rather than valuing the outcome and consequence.

I would like to document my baseline wellness metrics. Generally speaking, I sleep eight hours a day, although sometimes it may end up at seven. I get grumpy and cranky VERY easily. I exercise daily. Sometimes I spend a few hours on tech, but mostly on school reasons. Sometimes, its for personal reasons or social media.

MY APP

FUNCTIONALITY

My app is really helpful for me. The reward for me is having this streak where I can constantly see myself writing down my daily life. Reading what I wrote in the future is also entertaining for me. The reward motivates me to write everyday.

Besides that, personally, writing things down help me calm down a lot. I am able to write down my feelings and pour out my pain, nervousness, hurt, sadness, or happiness onto somewhere else. It feels like I am moving my burden onto something, making it much more lighter for me. This is why I generally journal when I feel nervous or down.

I like to use the streak feature a lot because it motivates me, and journaling helps me calm down and keep track of other ways I do so. However, some limitations of this app is going to be the fact that it doesn’t include other coping strategies. Despite the fact that journaling helps one calm down “by providing a cathartic outlet for stressful thoughts and emotions, allowing you [one] to process them, gain a sense of control, and foster a more relaxed physiological state.”, I personally also use other strategies to calm down, which I can only write down in the app.

The app promises:

MORE THAN WORDS

• Unlimited photos and video*

• Auto-importer for your Instagram posts*

• Handwritten entries or drawings*

• Voice recording and transcription*

JOURNAL FROM WHEREVER, WHENEVER

• Cross-platform apps available on iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, and Mac

• The ability to text or email entries straight to your journal

BUILT FOR REMINISCING

• On This Day feature allows you to revisit past memories

• Tags, favorites, and search filters make it easy to find what you’re looking for

• Map view quickly shows all the places you’ve journaled from

• Print capabilities turn your digital journal into a premium physical book

TYPE LESS, PRESERVE MORE

• Time, date, weather, moon phase, and more are automatically added to every entry

• IFTTT applets allow importing data from Spotify, YouTube, Strava, Fitbit, Facebook, Twitter, and more

• Siri Shortcuts provides a powerful way to automate more of your journaling

• Share sheet allows you to add content from other apps, like Apple Photos and Safari

These different features allow me to better understand the journaling experience, calming myself with increase effectiveness, helping me organize my journaling much better.

USEFULLNESS

alice01px2030_10-7-2025_10-18-35 Download

Recently, I’ve spent more time doing exercise and studying outside of tech. However, my sleep schedule has not improved as much, which isn’t great. I do find myself not as cranky, and truly trying to be open to suggestions. When I feel as if I have been pushed to the corner of the cliff, I practice breathing techniques, and write about it down in my journal, day one. It has helped me tremendously on this matter, as the amount of crash outs and sad days have decreased by a large amount.

I think that although the app had not improved my exercise, screen time, and sleep schedule that much, it still met my goal. Simply said, this is because my goal consists of a few factors, managing stress in situations, and calming down effectively. The journal process, the writing, has helped me overcome this challenge much easier. This allows me to think that I have, in fact, acomplished this goal over time.

Something that the app did, on the other hand, that caused great surprise for me, was how much it made me happy. Working on it everyday, putting in the dedication to make it look good, inside, I am somewhat proud. Features such as the photo adder, date automatically put on, these small things that could easily be ignored by the human eye, is what added the overall aesthetic to the journal, increasing my need and want to write in it.

I feel as if this app wouldn’t be perfect for people who are in need of a better living lifestyle, etc. This app, simply put, is somewhere you could write things down. Somewhere you could spill all your secrets, your fears, how you were hurt, the things you hate, without anyone seeing it. It does, however, motivate one to establish and polish their writing skills. The calendar feature allows one to be motivated to write. I do, however, believe that someone that wants to try new things, should be recommended to test out this app. It would not allow movitate them to write more, it allows them to document different experiences, leaving a lasting memory for the future to come.

DESIGN

The design of this app is simple. It lets you, yourself, motivate yourself to do better things. You want to write down the good things you do. One would want to be proud when reading back upon what themself had written in the past. Similarly, one would only prefer to take note of how they have done great things in the journal, causing a cycle where one would be motivated to do better things. The calander manipulates the user into wanting to keep a lasting journal streak, documenting memories that they would like to keep. This leads to the user constantly using the app to not only improve, but help promote the app and help the app gain popularity.

The app has a single way to make money. On the surface, its free, welcoming others to use. This easily attracts many people (simply because its in the human nature to prefer things that come easily). Then, it introduces another feature… the premium.

It includes features like having numerous photos in one journal, improving the overall experience. It talks about how one could finish their journal on another device “…start on your mac, finish on your ipad.” Finally, it adds on how audio recording to text journals could easily enhance the speed and effenciency of creating a journal page, further promoting their premium feature. Keeping these seemingly “amazing” features out of hand is what lures most users to spend their money on this app.

HOWEVER. It is easily possible to NOT use these features in any cimcumstance, suddenly making the premium feature dull to those like me. I will not be using and needing any of these features in this moment, and most likely will not in the future. For many of those who prefer to save money, it is simple and easy to find ways to make up to not using the new features. This is how and why the overall experience and encouragement of healthy habits is not overturn by the way the app earns profit. It does not, in any way, discourage the user to not nurture the healthy habit, which is what makes the app healthy and great to use.

Unit 1 Health Stress and the Brain Project Reflection

September 16, 2025 / Alice

During this unit, we learned all about the key players in the teens brain, the response FFF and stress coping strategies. These pieces of information, such as how the amygdala works with the hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex, has helped me in a various amount of ways. Knowing that the teen brain generally gives into desires or making bad decisions has helped me make better decisions in some ways. For example, when I’m about to choose to eat unhealthy or sleep late, I remember the key players in my brain, and the prefrontal cortex fighting against the amygdala. I like to imagine things a lot, in fact that this helps me (since I always want to be on the side of the PFC). Besides that, learning about coping strategies has greatly improved the way I handle certain situations. For instance, box breathing has helped me in volleyball during stressful situation. I do recall when I was making a lot of mistakes, and I felt like crying and breaking down. Instead, I used box breathing, and it helped me to calm down and improve.

One thing I learned during this unit is the way that the amygdala works and what it is. The amygdala is what helps one sense “danger” or stressful situations. With that said, the hippocampus, another key player in deciding the stress response, is the one that chooses how to actually react. Speaking of reaction, the prefrontal cortex helps teens and adults make good decisions, working things out properly. The reason adults seem to be less stress about certain situations and seem to handle things better is because their prefrontal cortex is more developed than teens.

There are many ways learning about the parts of the brain can improve adult teen relationship. One of them may be perhaps if the teen is able to thoroughly explain how making bad decisions may be often due to the fact that their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed, the adult will be able to feel empathy towards them, and together, they can work out problems and making the right choice.

I think personally, the stress coping strategy that has helped me as a person the whole the most is box breathing. As I mentioned earlier, box breathing helped me overcome challenges in volleyball. Besides that, I do it often during long tests or studies, perhaps before a presentation to help me calm down. It truly has helped me overcome many stressful situations and not react to the FFF. Speaking of the FFF, it stands for the Fight, Flight, and Freeze response. These are all different responses teens tend to go to, from running away to fighting head on these challenges, or perhaps freezing in place, unsure of what to do. These are the responses I would like to avoid, and box breathing has helped me do so. Box breathing has also helped me identify eustress, a healthy stress, considered and also known as “good stress”. Besides that, it has also helped me identify distress, the complete opposite of eustress, also known as “bad stress”. Overcoming these stresses have motivated me in some way, and helped me better shape my stress coping strategies.

Finally, I want to recall my project. I worked with my fellow partner, Ivy, and together, we showed effective collaboration, from working on the script together, discussing different points and ideas, to finishing and polishing the overall video. We were able to effectively put ideas on the table, sharing points when working on the script. When we were working on the video, she constantly surprised me on how great of a partner she was. When we said to work together, she never went off task, always by my side, working hard. She was also able to display her amazing editing skills when inserting a better green screen that I had, and when we had worked together to make captions.

This unit has helped me in many ways, from coping with stress to working with others, and I think it has opened a new window for me, one where I am able to overcome any challenge as long as I try.

Table Tennis Unit 1 PE Reflection

September 4, 2025 / Alice

This unit was pretty fun for me, and I learned a lot of new things, from spins to spikes. I was able to use these numerous moves for different purposes, increasing the joy I had when playing Table Tennis. I worked well with Katherine, and we were effective collaborators as we strategize and improved our overall performance by sharing our ideas and suggest new approaches to different serves and playing styles. However, sometimes, communication could be a little of a challenge. When we got frustrated, whether to the opponent, ourselves, or our partner, we tend to make more mistakes, leading to even greater rage. Being able to calm ourselves down was also a challenge. Nevertheless, this unit will always be one of my favorite units, as I can challenge myself and become better collaborators.

Alice's Portfolio