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.