John's Portfolio

We are doing a science project at physics class. We will be making a car using concepts learnt from newton’s laws and other physics concepts. Since we have to make a car for a race, I pondered, what force should I boost to make my car be the fastest? However, using a motor would be quite slow unless I get a fast motor, and using a balloon might be a risky approach.

Then, I thought, what force should I eliminate to win the race? I concluded that I wanted to remove friction. I initially thought of making my car lightly hover above the ground, and this thought developed into our team’s final idea of engineering a drone.

This would mean that we would be able to eliminate friction, and since motors of drones should be fast enough for them to stay flying, we thought that this would be an excellent idea. By critically thinking about what we need and we don’t need, I feel like I was able to achieve this conclusion. Although we haven’t started engineering yet, I hope we can get a solid result off of this idea!

I am part of the varsity MUN team in our school. Recently, I went to a conference called BEIMUN hosted by International School of Beijing. I participated as a crisis committee assistant chair, where I had to organize my committee to flow properly. In crisis committee, we debate about a historical event in chronological order. While debate occurs, people can send notes to backroom, where people can initiate operations which can change the path of history. For instance, spreading misinformation about others, or expanding the issue.

It was fun to see people debate and change the course of our topic: Brexit. For our committee, Brexit bill eventually didn’t pass and thus Brexit didn’t occur, which is quite different from what happens in actual history. Additionally, through backroom events, people created their own party, started assassinations, and even brought the Queen to interfere in Brexit, making the debate more engaging.

I enjoy MUN a lot since people can not only debate, but write a resolution where people can propose a solution to a global issue. BEIMUN was my 10th conference of my entire MUN career, and it was definitely fun to go outside of Shanghai to go to another school to participate in the conference.

Through this experience, I learnt how to be professional as a chair, while improving my communication skills with my other 4 fellow chairs to effectively operate our committee.

1. Creative Learning

I have worked on producing a song for creativity, which I often do for my hobby. It felt surreal to produce music at school, since I usually produce at my personal music space. Still I was able to make some interesting beats only with my iPod and my MacBook. It was an experience where I went out of my comfort zone but at the end I actually enjoyed it, which made me sometimes produce music at school when I felt inspired.

Skillful Communicator

I worked on my communication skills by presenting to the group of learning lab IFs about the idea that I had for the eagle apprenticeship program, focusing on the technical aspect of making eagle apprenticeship more appealing for students by making the point calculation system more simpler, rather than IFs continuously going around and marking everyone one by one. I presented the demo of the website that I made to address this problems in front of learning lab IFs, and I had some fruitful discussions with them regarding my product and how it can be improved for the future.

Effective Collaborator

I focused on a leadership to expand my collaboration with others. I mean others by people that thinks differently from me, and people with different age groups. For effective collaborator, I worked on creating my own club and hosting a meeting for the MS students. I effectively collaborated with my other leaders within these programs to ensure that everyone can enjoy their time here and get the most out of it. Some of the favorite moment I had at effective collaborator was when I saw the huge jump in people’s growth on the last day of my music production ASA, when we had a listen to everybody’s compositions so far. From people that didn’t even know any chords and any instruments, they grew up to someone that can digitally produce music. This brought me a lot of joy and pride from collaborating with these young students and learnt how I can implement new music production methods that my students had employed in their music as well. I also had fun with my club, which will soon be open again for semester 2. We are an environmental entrepreneurship club, and we are planning to keep expanding in terms of experimentation and partnerships in the future. This was a huge product from one of my activities in effective collaborator.

Resilience

I worked on my vision board for resilience task. Vision board made me rethink about who I am really an and what identities make myself. The interesting thing that I found about was: I actually don’t know that well about myself. It was quite a challenge to find out what I truly enjoy and what I liked. Entangling my complex mind, filled with stress and different commitments to discover my authentic identities, was a challenge to me. However, I felt more confident and self-aware after completing the task of vision board.

Critical Thinker

One highlight of critical thinker was playing gomoku with my friends. It was fun to approach the game with different strategies, and at after both of us getting more experience in the game, the games became so difficult that it took us several minutes to play the game. The repetition of forcing the opponent to make a move, then an attack afterwords, made the game more intense and interesting. It was interesting to address different strategies and breaking through the ‘forced’ moves in order to regain dominance in the game. As a board game enjoyer, this was a fun activity to work on my critical thinking skills.

I did eagle apprenticeship tasks based on these TTGs:

• critical thinker:
  • I was able to critically think through tasks by understanding diverse perspectives, and thinking in a relatively different way than I used to
• effective collaborator:
  • I effectively collaborated with others by building different things that were based on the apprenticeship tasks.
  • I learnt how to do my work in a group environment, and how I can be flexible when things didn’t go by our expectations and even enhance the quality of it
• skillful communicator:
  • I became a skillful communicator in group settings where I facilitated the work by splitting responsibilities among each members, and ensuring what people had to do to make our group successful
• creative learner:
  • I learnt creatively, especially at the maker space trying to design products using the laser cutter

I think the major take away from today’s learning lab class was ‘considering how others might perceive your message’🔥🔥🔥. This is because oftentimes people cannot fully understand our tone and even misunderstand our perspective on online communication. I learnt the importance of not only putting in my ideas from my perspective, but also considering the tone of what I send because people might perceive in a different way from what I intended.