First half of week one

 For my senior project, I am doing a new activity, learning something new, or improving on a skill (almost) every day. I chose this project initially because it was flexible and allowed me to try many different things that I would like to do but couldn't fill up an entire senior project. I also did this project because there are a lot of activities/skills that I would like to try/learn that I just have not gotten around to. It will also help me determine if I am interested in learning more about one of these new activities/subjects in the future. So far I have been working by myself and also plan to work with my parents on some later activities. My goals for this senior project are to set times to finish each day's project, reflect on my learning and apply any takeaways, and document each day and post it all at the end of each week.

 

My first day I spent learning how to communicate using morse code. I used the chart below along with a youtube video to learn how to communicate in morse code. Anything that goes to the left is a dot and anything that goes to the right is a dash, and this applies to all parts of the chart. 

Learning the letters themselves wasn't too difficult. I used phonetic tricks as suggested in the video to remember the pattern of each letter. I also focused on remembering the first segment of each code so that if I forgot, I could think about the first segment and try to remember the phonetic trick. I think that repetition was important while doing this and when learning something in the future will look to implement this. 

Tuesday and Wednesday I had a golf tournament so I did not do anything on those days. From now on I will be doing something every day for the rest of the project. On Thursday I read Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day. I choose to read this after reading his book "Never Let Me Go" in This Mortal Coil. The book follows Mr. Stevens, a butler, in the 1950s as he debates taking a trip and reminisces on his time at the prestigious estate he works for. I won't say more than that because I wouldn't want to spoil it.  I enjoyed it and thought that it was worth recommending to whoever reads this. I think that this is certainly a book that is much more impactful for those who are older but I think its message is pretty clear regardless and it makes for a good read. 

Friday, I decided to work on improving my penmanship. Today I did exercises from this video and have been tracing letters of the sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." since it has all the letters of the alphabet in it. I was surprised how tired this made my hand feel and was glad that my schedule caused me to do some early in the day and some in the afternoon. Here is what the sentence looked like before I practiced.

The last line of the next picture is what it looked like after I had practiced. 

While it doesn't look exactly like the text I was tracing, I think there was some significant improvement from my initial attempt. However, if I want to continue seeing the improvement I must be careful while writing. 

That's all for now, 

Bram