It's Crunch Time.

Here we are, about four days to our deadline to deploy our prototype by Friday, and we have no hard prototype. That's a bummer, and it's somewhat due to our (lack of) communication with certain parties. BUT-- we have an upcoming meeting and possible conference call tomorrow with Mrs. Martin and Mr. Cardenas. We need to get them in direct communication with one another so everyone is on the same page and ensure that we CAN get a radio from the transportation department for the office's use. According to Mr. Cardenas in our phone call today, we can use a radio from transportation and hook it up to the PA system so that all the office has to do is switch it on at 3:30 and turn it off at 4:00pm. So that's the good news— we were relieved that all hope is not lost, haha. But we do need to work out some logistics, which we hope the meeting tomorrow will cover, because we are not entirely clear on a couple things that Mr. Cardenas went over with us.

On a side note, Kenny checked the survey results. So far 67 people have taken our survey, and what has come to our attention is that people generally support our idea, but would especially support it if TERMINAL BUS was included. ...Another interesting idea to examine? We hope so. We'll see. :)

Prezi prezi prezi

Courtesy of http://prezi.com/

It's been kind of slow on the work front-- getting clear communication from the people we need it most from has been quite difficult because they haven't responded to our emails-- but we've been trying to make up for it by getting a head start on our Final Report and our Oral Presentation. Rachelle has put together our data in a clean and neat fashion-- thank you, Rachelle! And Kenny created and distributed our SurveyMonkey survey both via approved email and Facebook. He did a great job :). Who knew how much technology would play a role in our project? Speaking of technology, we're planning to use Prezi (http://prezi.com/) to "spice up" our oral presentation. It's a neat, innovative way to make the average keynote presentation A LOT MORE INTERESTING. So we'll be working on that... it's just too bad that we're not getting responses from the folks at Transportation. I'm sure they're very busy, but we were in contact up until last week... I'll be sure to send yet another friendly reminder, but I've sent out at least two emails with no response. This is shaping up to be another potential roadblock, but we'll try again tomorrow. At least we've got a lot of "other stuff" done; it's just the actual transferral of information that needs to take place. We've set up the rest. :)

Check and check!

Today we sent out our finalized survey to Mr. Blake so he could send it to Ms. Martin. Now, we can finally collect more data other than the bus arrival times at the Konia and Paki bus stop. We also posted out survey link on the Grade 11 Facebook page because we know more people check Facebook than their emails...well, at least the normal high school student does. By the end of the class period we got 5 completed surveys! Whoo we're so popular, LOL jk. But no really we're glad people are (hopefully) taking our survey seriously because this data will be useful if administration or the transportation department would like to see its effectiveness. Our blogpost picture shows the charts we have made so it's easier for people to see when the buses have been arriving and departing Konia and Paki bus stop for the past couple of weeks. We hope to include these charts in our final presentation so people can see them!

7 days remaining....

so today we didnt actually have class and honestly our forward progression in getting our plan into action has been at kind of a stand still for the past few days because we have been awaiting approval from ms. martin to be able to send out surveys. tomorrow we will find out if we are able to send out surveys which i am pretty sure we will get approval for. if not then we will just have to move forward without that data from students. we are also still waiting for Mr. Cardenas' response to our emails in order to find out what he has learned from the bus drivers in the past few days about whether a second announcement by them would be possible. since we havent been able to actively move our project forward in the past few days, we have been using that time to start our oral presentation. this extra time is kind of good in that sense because we definitely need it to write up our presentation.

We So Studious!

So, today in class our group continued progress for our project! We sent out another e-mail to Mr. Cardenas and Ms. Martin with more information and data we've collected from both the Konia and Paki bus stops this week. After collecting our data though, we realized we didn't collected bus stop times on the same day therefore our data is not 100% accurate. But! We are planning to collect bus stop times again today after school to get more accurate information. All should go well! In our blogpost picture you can see us and Mr. Blake working so studiously in the classroom. Lol. No, but really today we began the draft of our final report and all is going well :) we will continue to work on our report while we wait for further approval from Ms. Martin to send out our bus survey to the student body.

bus stops are hot..

so yesterday we uploaded the data that was collected from the konia bus stop and it was kind of surprising to see just how quickly the buses come and go from the stop. this data is useful but incomplete, we needed to also gather data from the paki bus stop. so i sat down at paki at around 2:25 and waited for the buses to begin loading. the first four buses were already in place when i arrived but didnt start loading until 3:30. this is good to know because it means that they arent leaving before the official end of study hall. they did not however waste time sitting around, after about a minute, each bus would leave and be replaced by another. this means that notifying konia even when buses are just leaving paki could be just enough time or possibly too late. even if we might still need to collect more information before submitting any of it, just being more aware of it is important for our project

It's my turn to be sick :( but we've got good news too

So I am super sick. 102° fever. I will not be able to come (probably) on Wednesday, so my apologies to my group as I heal up. But I would like to present some news— these are the results of Rachelle's bus timing from Friday. It shows that the buses don't take a long time to load at Konia— they load up in a minute or so (taken from when the bus passes the entrance of Konia circle). Kaneohe B was very late, as you can see, and is the main outlier in our data. If Nanakuli B is able to get to Konia and load up at 3:32, we would deduce that the bus driver is leaving Paki early, because it takes a lot longer to get up to Konia than two minutes. This may be a point to bring up to Mr. Cardenas, but for now we will just gather more data. However, Kenny also put together a survey in SurveyMonkey for students to take so we can gather more information and judge how effective our project has been. Mr. Blake is asking permission from Mrs. Martin to send a mass email to all students so we can increase participation, so we'll find out on Thursday if we can email it to everyone. :)

PROM this weekend! (yes, it's physics related)

On the way to prom...

So I didn't post yesterday because of PROM, but I've got the weekend shift and will post today. Ironically, prom has to do with our physics project— I saw Mrs. Martin there, and she stopped me, saying, "Hey, I just wanted to let you know that your group's physics proposal went really well. You guys got a lot of the work done. Good job!" I relayed to her a brief summary of our group's correspondence with Island Signal and Robert Cardenas from the Transportation Department, promising to keep her in the loop as we move this project forward. When prom ended and everyone scrambled outside to their respective vehicles, I was reminded of the very problem we were trying to create a solution for at school— most people didn't know what time and where they were being picked up, and waited as a mass in a concentrated area for their rides. Similar to the bus situation, people were waiting in a crowded place where it was easier to search for their rides, but there weren't any buses that came to pick them up, just cars, trucks, Hummers, and limos. We're going to be working on implementing our surveys and hopefully collecting data this week, so we'll see how that goes. :)

Instazzz

Big smiles for being productive!! 

We present you with good news once again! Our group used our class time super duper efficiently today and we were able to add the final touches to our detailed design. As of right now, we aren't able to fully complete our design because we need further approval from Mr. Cardenas and the transportation department. On the other hand, we did get in touch with the Island Signals Communication Company and they told us that connecting the walkie talkies with the PA system is possible, but we have to make sure transportation is able to create a relay system that pages the PA system. Our plan is still waiting on transportation, but once everything with them is finalized, our solution can begin to be put into effect. The one down side to this though is that since the PA system is supposed to be used for emergency purposes only, it will interfere with the bus announcements that go on. On the bright side, the PA system has rarely been used (if ever) by the office during the after school times so using it after school should not be much of a problem. Yay!

administration....we is boiz!

today we had our meeting with the administrators which went fairly well i think. they all seemed to agree that a system such as ours would be a nice addition to the betterment of our school. now that we have their attention we can move forward more with our plan of hopefully implementing the PA systems as a part of our solution. tomorrow another part of our project is due, and that is the detailed design. in this we need to further our estimates of cost. at this point we really just aren't completely sure about what our final costs will be because we are still waiting for more information with our correspondent in the transportation department mr. cardenas. once we have this we should have a very accurate assessment of final costs for our project. as of now the only things that we think could cost us anything would be another walkie talkie for use of someone in the office to connect them with the bus drivers.

Meeting with the people in power? ☑

(The above picture is a manilla folder that includes all the information on bus riders/schedules we've received from transportation thus far).

About two hours ago Nikki, Kenny and I had a meeting with the high school administration (whoa, scary) to propose to them our physics problem and what we see as a possible solution. It was very nice of Mr. Blake to take the time out of his busy schedule to stay with us through the meeting because being around all those important and powerful people was pretty intimidating. The meeting was short, but we were able to get our point across and let the administrators know what we are trying to do. They were very supportive and feel like what we are trying to do can really make a change in the high school. As of right now, we are waiting for an email from Mr. Cardenas to see what the transportation department has in mind with the radio system that could potentially be hooked up to the PA system. Mr. Cardenas hoped that he could test the communication networks between the bus drivers and the radio this afternoon, and we are hoping all goes well so we can win approval over the PA system :)

Approved!!!!

so today's physics class was interesting indeed. our group started out small with only 3 people in it and today one of our members decided to get sick (i think she had ebola or something like that). in any case we were quite undermanned. we did not however let this slow down the forward motion (lol get it?) of our project. we got a nice package in the mail from mr. mike hooper with whom we spoke last week, it contained quite a bit of information regarding student bus riders. from this we learned that there are about 300 students who are signed up to catch the bus home from konia every day. we also discussed today the possibility that maybe all that is really needed is a more accurate time table of bus arrivals because the one we were given said that all of the buses were to be leaving konia at 3:30 which we all know is not what happens. we are still working out what we are going to do for sure but if we are involving the p.a. systems then we will be sure to use the inner workings of them in our report due on friday. oh yeah we also discussed our project plan with kumu blake and we were approved!!!!!

And now we're waiting...

 I know, this blogpost must seem REALLY boring, but there's really nothing else to post about. We're currently in the waiting phase of our project— we're waiting for important documents from Mr. Hooper (to be sent via campus mail), waiting for Rachelle to get better (get well Rachelle!), waiting for contact from Robert Cardenas, Mr. Hooper's boss, and waiting for the deadline to approach (just kidding.) We're just getting our proposal ready and hopefully airtight for Thursday's meeting. We hope to answer questions about the number of kids this would reach, the intricacies of the proposed PA system, and how this would work accurately and automatically. I think we'll try to answer those questions tomorrow. Kenny and I will try to hold down the fort if Rachelle is still sick (hopefully not) but I'm sure it will be fine. We just want to make sure that we're prepared for anything Mrs. Martin and the administration team have to throw our way :).

Friday's (LATE) Blogpost!

Waiting for Ms. Martin in the office :O

First off, I would really like to apologize for this late blogpost that I was supposed to have completed by Friday night. I promise there won't be another late blogpost!

But anyways, our interview with Ms. Martin on Thursday after our interview with Mr. Mike was very helpful because it gave us the reality expectations of what our plan would take. As Nikki explained in the prior blogpost, there were many other problems/roadblocks that came about in our meeting with Ms. Martin that we weren't expecting. The most shocking thing to our group would probably have to be the fact that the PA system is actually only for emergencies. I don't think anyone in our group realized this as we created the PA system solution, so we realized we needed to find another way to somehow make announcements through another system. This will prove harder than it sounds (even though it doesn't sound easy) but we're up for the task! We're excited to see how our solution will actually pull through because with all these changes, who knows, we might end up implementing something completely different :)

Mrs. Martin and the upcoming meeting

After interviewing with Mrs. Martin on Thursday, we realized that we had a few kinks to work out in our otherwise innovative plan. The problem with our current solution, as Mrs. Martin so adeptly put, was that there is an insufficient number of people working in the office at the considered time of day (afterschool/study help period) and the limited number of people there are so busy with a variety of other time-consuming tasks, so to press a button and initiate the bus sequence over the PA system would be just another task to add to the never ending list. Whoa. I did not foresee that roadblock. However, I don't think it will be a major problem if we can find a way to make the system self-sufficient; initiated at the proper time by a student, perhaps, or something. But we are making progress— we've knocked out two interviews and will hopefully get to one more as we prepare for an administrative meeting on Thursday. Mrs. Martin kindly invited us to share our ideas at this week's high school administrative team meeting for the first five minutes in order to get a feel of how her colleagues would respond to our idea, and we accepted, as you can see from the email sent above. We hope to have a few more questions answered by then, and Mr. Hooper, who has been a great help to us, is sending his information via campus mail. I am confident that his bus data will be able to provide answers to Mrs. Martin's questions, and we look forward to sharing with her and the rest of the high school administrative team.

Mahalo Uncle Mike!

so today we were extremely fortunate because mr. blake was able to set up a meeting for our group with Mr. Michael Hooper who is in charge of some part of transportation. we explained our project and our plan of action to fix it to him. he had very interesting ideas regarding possible solutions to the problem as well as much more information as to what happens on the transportation department's side of things. he said that at present, all of the buses are to start loading students at 3:30 in order from longest route to shortest. this seems to be a pretty effective way of doing things but he has another idea which is to start different buses from different locations in order to speed up the process of loading students and getting them out and on their way home. he presented more ideas similar to these which may not necessarily be they types of things that we could work with but he also told us about a program which he uses to organize all 28 buses which is called common tracker. using this system he is able to view the gps location of all of the buses at any time. we were hoping to possibly get a device like this in smith office and at a certain point when each bus is near konia have a pre recorded anouncement play informing students of the  near arrival of their bus. we thanked mr. hooper for his time and mana'o and proceeded to Ms. martin's office....

"Attention, Attention! Your bus will be here in 5 minutes"

Courtesy of: http://www.artisticcontrols.com/images/public-address-system.jpg

Let's see, so far our group has proposed to you two solutions we find could solve the bus stop dilemma. One of which may be more reasonable than the other. But, guess what? Our ideas don't stop there. We've got one more idea, and this one consists of working with administration to get a hold of the PA system. Whether it be study hall, in a classroom, or hanging out with friends in the hall, I'm sure people would rather spend their time hanging out in these places than the bus stop any day. That's why, we are proposing, as our third solution, to somehow find a way to make bus announcements everyday after school for everyone to hear...no matter where they are. The PA system is great for sending out mass announcements to the student body at any time during the day because it is likely these students will be somewhere near an announcement box. We would somehow get the transportation department and the Konia office to work together allowing an announcement to go off 10 minutes before each country bus comes. We think this could be very beneficial for all bus riders, and if successful, could carry onto the Paki bus stop as well.

"is that an airport?" nope, just konia bus stop!

you know how at the airport when you are headed out on your long earned journey to disney land and your flight is inevitably delayed simply because the universe hate you? yes we have all been in this situation and the step right after crying profusely is to check one of those cool sideways tv things that they have on the walls that show all the times of flights arriving and departing. well imagine having one of those boards available for use by students at konia so that they could view the position of their bus along its route to the bus stop. this would give students the knowledge and power to more accurately manage their time after school while waiting for their ride home to arrive. they could possibly get over 15 minutes of extra study time in after classes are finished! thats a lot of time, if you add up even just one week thats over an hour! this is just one of the ways that our group is considering as a solution to the cramped bus stop situation which currently is a problem at our school.

Proposed Solution #1: Mobile Alerts

          The previous blogpost proposed a problem we see and feel as a group, can solve for this project. As a group, we have come up with three different solutions that may or may not be reasonable to put into effect. Our first idea has to do with mobile alerts through a cell phone. Just like TheBus Company has HEA, the Kamehameha bus drivers and transportation department would have some way to contact bus riders to let students know when their bus is going to arrive. We feel this is a potentially efficient solution because in this generation people live on their phones. I personally don't know anyone in high school who doesn't own a phone. These devises are always in people's pockets, if not in their hand. So, if your phone is always with you, it would only be beneficial to the rider to rely on a text to let them know when their bus is going to arrive. This way, the rider won't have to rush or guess what time their bus will come.

(what the alert would look like)

          On the other hand, we do realize there are flaws with this solution.
          Say, you forget your phone at home and you are no longer to receive the notification because you don't have your phone. Or maybe you're not able to send or receive text messages on your phone because it's not included in your data plan. We do realize that these may bring up issues, but we also offer simple solutions to these drawbacks.
          Ask a friend who catches the same bus (and has the mobile alerts) so you know when your bus is going to come, or something like that. IF all else should fail, we have a simple solution to that too.
          Wait at the bus stop :)

(where people normally wait)

          This is our proposed solution number one and although it may not be flawless, we are making progress!

The Situation

What do we see as a problem?

        Kids don’t know when their bus comes, resulting in an influx of people congregating around the Konia bus stop area, making it difficult for teachers to drive out, making it awkward for other students to pass by and limiting the amount of time students have to spend studying after school. 

(what we want the bus stop to look like)

Most students who ride the bus know the bus order, but when buses become unreliable (for example, break down, or there is a bus combination), students would like to be aware in some way of when their bus is going to come (5-10 minute alert in advance, etc).

It would also be nice to know when the bus is leaving middle school or high school (like Paki) and this depends whether it's a middle school/high school bus, or just a high school bus.

This is a problem we see is evident on our campus and we would like to solve it.

Interview with the Beck-ster!

 (Mr. Becker's suggestions from the interview)

          When our group decided that we would all do an interview with a teacher to see their insights and suggestions for our physic's final project, I decided that Mr. Becker would be the perfect candidate. He's very easy to talk to, making it more fun to conduct an interview. I started off by showing him our bug list and asked him to list his top three choices out of our 11. He liked our first idea, which was putting some sort of shade over Konia field. After he read that idea, he thought of another problem that could be solved. He suggested that we find a way to make the front of Konia have some type of shaded seating so kids could sit there instead of crowding the halls. Teachers would also appreciate this because there would be less noise during class. I thought this was a great suggestion because coming from a student's perspective, now we wouldn't have to push through hallways saying, "Excuse me"..."Umm, thank you" anymore! After suggesting this idea, he also said he didn't like how much homework teachers gives their students. He believes that there should be less homework outside of school because kids are just so overwhelmed with work that they have no enthusiasm for school whatsoever. This may not be a problem our group can solve directly, but it is an interesting idea....haha. I totally agree with it!

          Overall, I feel that our group is continuing to head in the right direction...which is forward! We all conducted our own individual interviews on our own time so we haven't wasted any class time having to do that. Collaborating on our problems have gotten our group to come up with some great new ideas. We look forward to deciding which problem we hope to solve to improve daily life on this hill!

co-ed bathroom

change one of the girls bathrooms in konia into a coed bathroom

ohhh kumu V....

today i had the pleasure of interviewing my homeroom teacher in order to gain an insiders point of view on things that teachers want to see changing about the school. this would be a pretty routine task except for one thing... my homeroom teacher is mr. Vinta. i was prepared for strange from the get go but he surprised me with some actually good ideas! for example when i asked him what pissed him off about the school, he replied that it is a pain in his butt to have to upload grades to ksconnect and then to another website on top of that! now this really isnt something that i could affect with our project but it was a nice start off with a good suggestion. some of the other ideas he had included was to kill mass numbers of gnats at once, as well as light sabers. the list goes on with ideas of things that Vinta would like to change about our school, unfortunately he was unable to come up with anything really feasible for us to do for our project, it was still good however to gain insight into what the teachers are thinking.

Spring Break is over = we need to start working

Hello all Supahbad Physics bloggers! Welcome back from a (hopefully) relaxing spring break. Today Mr. Blake "got real" with us and showed us the numbers... they're not looking pretty, folks! Take a look below:

Courtesy of https://sites.google.com/site/hoouluiakamehameha/

Needless to say, we've got a lot of work ahead of us. Mr. Blake wanted to get us inspired, so he showed us a YouTube video of people in the Philippines making a difference in their community by using cheap materials in an effective manner. The result? Cheap lighting in homes using water bottles. It just goes to show that even the smallest and most unlikely things can make a huge impact in someone's life. 

Since we had a lot more of the project to "reintroduce" today, we basically took the time to divide up duties and whatnot. Starting today, we'll be writing a daily blogpost— I'll be writing it on Mondays and weekends, Rachelle will be writing it on Wednesdays and Fridays, and Kenny will be writing it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. 


We also broke down some groundwork— as we've already created a "bug list", now's the time to get input from REAL LIVE PEOPLE. Like teachers, students, and anyone else we see on campus. So we'll be conducting interviews within the next couple of days. I'll be contacting Mrs. Razee, the APUSH teacher, Kenny will be talking to Mr. Vinta, the English teacher, and Rachelle will interview Mr. Beckett, the Photography teacher. We wanted to get a wider range of perspectives, and figured that interviewing teachers with almost nothing in common would be able to accomplish that. In our interviews, we'll give them a copy of our current bug list, explain our project, and ask them about their own experiences during the school day and how we could make their tasks more efficient. I think we will be pretty successful in our interviews— and hopefully they will help us narrow down how we can make Kamehameha a better place. Let's do this and make this project the best we can! :)

Kenneth watched the lorax!

so apparently i was a deprived child and never had the good fortune of having the lorax read to me nor did i ever read it, in fact i had never even heard of it until a few weeks ago! i thought mr. Blake just wanted to give us a fun homework assignment, i was wrong. the movie actually had many lessons to be learned from it. from the obvious one which is protecting the environment, to others like the fact that a single person is all that is needed to change the world. the movie can be related to what we are trying to do with our ho'oulu ia kamehameha projects because it has to do with finding solutions to things before the opportunity has passed and you are left with a nearly irreversible result, this was shown in the movie when the ounceler (i think thats how you spell it...) watched the last tree fall down and realized how terrible of a thing he had done. we need to prevent things like that from happening in our world by doing our ho'oulu ia kamehameha project!

Rachelle's Film Review: The Lorax

When we were assigned the task of watching The Lorax, I was kind of shocked that watching a children’s movie would relate somehow to our improving Kamehameha project. After watching the movie though, I can see how Mr. Blake feels that we could get important lessons out of the movie. One lesson I feel stands out the most is the fact that it takes only one person to make a positive influence on the people around them. Ted, for example, comes to be the hero at the end of the story because he was given the task of planting the last Truffula seed so the trees and the Lorax could return. I feel that this lesson relates to our project because even though my group is only made up of 3 people and Kamehameha has a student body of almost 2,000 kids, our ideas and choices to help improve the school can benefit each person on our campus in some way. Ted was only one boy, but his determination and actions ending up working out for the better. Our groups dedication, determination and choices will hopefully end up helping our school for the better.