Reflection Post Questions

1. What did you learn? I learned not only a lot about the titanic, and how it was built, many of its parts, and what they did, but i also learned about the people and brainpower that went into the titanic. Without computers and other technoligies we are privelaged to have today.
2. What was your research question? How was the Titanic built?
3. What was the answer to your research question? Our question can't be simply answered in one sentence..but if I had to, I would say that it was built in Belfast, and by many large pieces of equiptment that have become a site that is no longer used to build ships, but is visited as a landmark.
4. Did your final product answer that question? How? Yes, our final project answered this question. We built a very large model of the Titanic, that is made to scale, which enables everyone to see all of the parts, and we also blogged about it, so even if they don't get a chance to see our visual model, anyone can better understand how it was made. We used our visual as an aid to us, not to just sit there and explain all of the information. We researched many hours so that we could explain it, so it worked out how we wanted it to.
5. What did you do well on the project? We found all of the research, and shared it with eachother, so that we could both benefit from the sites that we found that we felt helped us.
6. What could you have improved on the project? At the beginning, blogging on the times they were supposed to be finished.
7. What would you change about what you did on the project? We could have finished the blogging earlier, to leave ourselves more time to figure out exactly how we wanted to do the final physical, visual part of the project.
8. What would you change about the assignment itself? I enjoyed this assignment because I got to choose a topic that I wanted to research, and something that interested me. Usually when a topic is assigned, the student doesn't learn as much, or as well.
9. What grade do you think you deserve on the project? I think that we desserve an a on this project, if we were being graded on the normal system. Why? We worked for many hours, and put a lot of effort into this project. The final project also looked very nice, and you could tell how hard we worked on it. It was a little difficult for us to make it perfectly to scale, since neither one of us had done something like it before. It also required that we figured out a lot of math before EVERY LINE we drew to make our model.

Titanic Plan

To do this project me and my partner have decided to build a model of the titanic showing the different parts it has. To do this though we are going to take a piece of styrofoam and cut it into a shape of the Titanic. Then we are going to somehow attatch a piece of white paper to it and draw the inside and the different parts onto it. On the other side we will draw the outside of the Titanic. While we present this peoject we will have index cards with information. We will cover the interior of the titanic, deck plans, parts that powered the ship and how they worked, and statistics of the ship.http://www.geocities.com/Athens/oracle/8912/construc.html
http://www.historyonthenet.com/Titanic/largecutaway.htm
http://www.abratis.de/ship/construct/
http://www.titanic-nautical.com/titanic-facts.php
http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/deckplans/
http://www.lessons-from-history.com/Level%203/Titanic%20Blueprints.htmlhttp://www.geocities.com/titanicandco/inside.html

Daily Post

Today Becca wasn't here. So I didn't have access to what we were working on together last class together. Now im okay though because mr.n. gave me a copy of what we started working on last time. That helped a lot, and I typed it under my account so I can have it too. :)

Daily Post

Today I finished all of my index cards, and I am very excited about finishing. :)
The last subject of the titanic I studied today was the quality of the metals used to make the great and "unsinkable" ship, the Titanic. To my understanding, the metals weren't pure enough type of a thing, which made them more easily breakable. If the steel was made right, and more pure, the ship could have probably stood up to the strength of the ice burg that brought it down, and took the lives of many innocent people.

Thirtieth Index Card

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980CE1DB133AF934A15752C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

• EVER since the Titanic was discovered in the depths of the North Atlantic a dozen years ago, her steel plates melting into rivers of rust, expeditions have repeatedly probed the hulk. And investigators armed with a growing body of evidence have been working to solve riddles posed by the opulent liner's sinking.
• The ship, of course, was moving too fast through a sea of towering ice when it struck a large floe on its inaugural voyage in 1912. But much uncertainty has surrounded the exact nature of the damage and whether it might have been avoided in whole or part if the ship's design or construction had been different, perhaps preventing the loss of more than 1,500 lives.
• Now, after years of analysis and any number of false leads, experts say they have preliminary evidence suggesting that the Titanic, the biggest ship of her day, a dream of luxury come to life, may have been done in by structural weaknesses in some of her smallest and least glamorous parts: the rivets.
• Two wrought-iron rivets from the Titanic's hull were recently hauled up from the depths for scientific analysis and were found to be riddled with unusually high concentrations of slag, making them brittle and prone to fracture.
• ''We think they popped and allowed the plates to separate and let in the water,'' said William H. Garzke Jr., a naval architect who heads a team of marine forensic experts investigating the disaster.
• The rivet analysis, which Mr. Garzke and other experts said must be considered tentative because of the small number of rivets sampled, sheds light on findings made public last year. Experts, diving down nearly two and a half miles to peer through thick mud with sound waves, discovered that the Titanic's bow had been pierced by six thin wounds, the damage apparently done as hull seams were forced open. The finding laid to rest the myth that the iceberg had sliced open a 300-foot gash in the ship's side and strengthened interest in the possibility of rivet failure.
• The new analysis was done by Dr. Timothy Foecke, a metallurgist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a Federal agency in Gaithersburg, Md. It helps set industry standards and employs some of the Government's top metallurgists.
• Working with Mr. Garzke, who is chairman of the marine forensics panel of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, a professional group based in Jersey City, Dr. Foecke analyzed the two Titanic hull rivets, cutting them in half and probing their composition with tools like microscopes and image analyzers. His work revealed an overabundance of slag, the glassy residue left over from the smelting of metallic ores.
• ''The microstructure of the rivets is the most likely candidate for becoming a quantifiable metallurgical factor in the loss of Titanic,'' Dr. Foecke concludes in a report, ''Metallurgy of the R.M.S. Titanic,'' to be formally released early next month.
• In the report and interviews, Dr. Foecke said the slag content of the rivets was more than three times as high as is normally found in modern wrought iron, making it less ductile and more brittle. While it is not clear whether a better grade of rivets would have saved the ship, he said, the developing evidence points in that direction.

Daily Post

Today I began reading about Befast, during the time of the building of the Titanic, and her sister ship, the Olympic. They were a big deal, and visited often by the public, but there were many other industries much larger than that of the ship-building. I have also caught up on a lot of the index cards I need for this project. :)

Twenty-ninth Index Card

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/exhibition/belfast/main.html

• The iconic Belfast industry, however, was shipbuilding.
• It did not employ as many workers as the linen industry, but its achievements brought international renown to the city.
• Throughout the nineteenth century the shallow waters of the city were redeveloped into a major port, which were home to what became the largest ship-builders in the world.
• In 1859 Edward Harland bought the shipyard in the port which he had previously managed.
• Two years later he took Gustav Wolff as his partner.
• They expanded over the following decades, and by 1900 Harland and Wolff employed 9,000 people.
• In 1911 they launched the Titanic, then the largest ship in the world, which sank so dramatically on its maiden voyage.