Cory Fife's Portfolio

People have always wondered what has been inside the earth and all of the processes that happen inside of it. We already know what the earth is capable of on the surface and just a little about the inside, but what would happen if we could understand and know what happens inside of the earth to see the truth to what makes everything we see today? Well, with the plate tectonics project, one could answer some of these questions. We were given the task to create a model for a location given to us by our teacher and with our groups, we have to develop a model to accurately demonstrate what happens at a plate boundary, a location that two plates meet and collide with each other. But the reason we did this project was to teach others how or why the earth created various locations such as Japan or Hawaii by sending the best models that both showed excellent evidence and a well designed model that went with the evidence provided to different schools. During this project, we had to use tools to precisely cut and create the foundation and the parts for our group’s model and to make dimensions of how it should be sized, but I had little experience with these tools before we started the project. Throughout this project however, I got better at using these types tools and with this new knowledge, I grew in designing during this project. By growing in designing, Me and my group had to think outside of the box.

Before the project started, we chose a location where plate boundaries were at work. I chose Japan for my location and was grouped with people who chose the same location as I did. My partners were Dalin and Brody. For my first artifact for this project, I chose our green sheet that shows what our model is designed and what measurements is each part. For example, our final model’s mantle was 12x8x3  inches (which had been the maximum sizing for the model) , but we had the option to make our model be smaller in size. We chose to make it the largest we could We first made a model in Maya (a 3D modeling software) to create a prototype of the physical model that we would make, then after approval of this model, we had to make ideas about how our physical model would had been sized. After we had got the approval from our teacher, we started to create our model. With this going on, we finished or completed our prototype model based on what we wanted. During this process with this artifact, I learned various words and features from Maya. This helped with our model production because it was easier to build from what we learned from the 3D model. The Maya program was important to this project because we could look at an example of a model that could look like and function how we wanted it to. However when we got started doing the project, we thought we needed more time, but with Maya it became easier because of how we could include what we learned with the 3D model to the physical model.

A second artifact that I chose for this project would be our final model because this model was the overall  project from this entire envandor that we put our best we could do with what we learned and and had to build it..  Going back to the green sheet, after getting approved for our model size we started to create our prototype model and get critique from real engineers. It was awesome to be critique by these types of people because of how professional they are with design to help us with ideas of our model. From this feedback, our group thought of a new design for our final model. During the construction of our model, we learned more about Japan, which was a ocean-ocean convergent, which means that two ocean plates are colliding into each other. One of the plates start subducting underneath the other from being denser. This was evidence of learning about my claim of designing because we learned how pieces go together and make a system that uses pieces which interact with one another and do something amazing.

As this project came to a close, it is for certain that I had grown in designing because of how this project had been with all of the accurate and precise measurements we needed and all of the tools that we used to make the parts possible. One thing a great designer does is make mistakes, but learning from those mistakes is what makes designers better. This is what me and my group did throughout this project.  I had also thought of growing in persistence because of how many times i had made some piece for our model & not being the right cut or angle, but we had never gave up trying to make the best model we could make. I hope that in the near to late future, I can do a project that uses the same type of learning structure just as this one to learn more.