WH GCE Portfolio

For this second unit of our Humanities class, Global Peace, we learned about the principles of Mahatma Gandhi, and how activists use and follow them today. We also learned about types of violence and how they affect people and the system that we've put into place. For this Action Project, we were tasked with researching and creating a paper for an activist that follows Gandhi's principles. Below is my research paper. In conclusion, I thought that this was quite an interesting, yet challenging, project. The person that I researched was quite interesting to learn about. I also think that this project gave me a bit of insight into how economists and peace activists can connect and communicate, and how someone with the right motivation can change the world with their ideas.

For the second unit of my Biomimicry class, Like an Animal, we learned more about how we can use the processes, forms, and behaviors of animals through biomicry. In this Action Project, we learned about how we can take the form, process, or ecosystem of an animal and incorporate it into design. We had to take the aspects of an animal, and apply it to a structural design, and to a transport design. The animal species that I chose for a structural design was the African mound-building termite, Macrotermes jeanneli , as seen below. These termites live mainly within grasslands and savannas. Termites create unique mounds with unique ventilation systems that work very well, to act as a lung for the nest that is located beneath the mound. Thin outer channels of the mound heat up rapidly during the day when compared to the deeper tunnels in the mound, which causes air to circulate in a closed-loop convection cell. During the day, air moves up along the outer channels and down the center...