CLT Project

Through this entire year of discovering this new subject, we had a lot of problems in our work, and in mostly on our first term. As rat labs of this new school activity, we did not know what we were facing and going against; after the first term I think it went better than ever actually.

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We started our year with one question, what should we do? Initially we did not have a lot of information on how to do a project but with the assistance of our teachers we could eventually do it. We can also say that we developed our technologic skills by working with them basically all year which was very interesting and different from other subjects.

 

Our first term was, as we mentioned before, the most difficult one, and well that is because of the new experience itself but we had some troubles along the way. The first problem was choosing a theme for our project, we were very insecure and a little bit confused, the list of topics that the teachers gave us was a pretty good guide, but we still were lost. But from that same list, we took an idea: Modern Physics, that should be interesting right? We agreed but we still did not have anything solid. After some discussions with the teachers and with some people non-project related, we came to the conclusion that the best choice was Radioactivity, the reasons for that were that, well, it was pretty easy for a first presentation, it was interesting and could be easily connected to our English themes which we decided that according to the main topic should be Environmental Issues and Minorities, although this last one didn’t have the attention, we wanted it to get in the first place. 

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We struggled a lot in our research if you believe or not. It was our first time doing it and we didn´t know what we were supposed to research. After a while we found our paths and we knew how to do it. Tomás Taborda managed the theory of Radioactivity and its History, Gonçalo Pardal oversaw the Medicine behind Radioactivity and Rodrigo Santos ran the English Themes, mainly Environmental Issues. Everyone knew their job, and everyone fulfilled it. We prepared our research, presentation, and documents, we worked a lot on that term, because well everything was new and because of that we wanted to do something good! We got so hyped and deep into our research that we went to overextend our presentation so much that our oral presentation was interrupted and fundamentally cancelled at its half, which for us was a heartbreak for our little hard-working hearts.

 

On that day, the day of our presentation, we think it went well. We were speaking English Fluently, and we were not nervous believe or not, but because of our extension, we got to a point that we surpassed the 30-minute limit which was sad. Specially one member of the group, Tomás Taborda, was the main problem although he did it by accident. Of course, that no one wanted to do something like that, but he surpassed the 10-minute individual limit which was heart-breaking. Because that we got cut on our presentation, we could not present the things that were important as well which were the History of Radioactivity and one of the English Themes that we wanted to talk about which was Minorities and its importance for the women community thanks to a big figure related to Radioactivity: Marie Curie.

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That was indeed very sad for us and left us disappointed in ourselves.

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On the second term was different. We could say that was our “comeback” presentation and that it was our redemption for the first term. Since the start of the term, the government itself forced us to stay inside in our homes due to COVID and its high-speed infection rate in Portugal. So, because of that our work was different from the last term. We made things and wrote things much faster since we had so much free time. And since from the start of the second term, we always tried to have the knowledge of what we were doing wrong, so that the errors that we had done did not repeat it selves again in this term.

 

From the beginning, we wanted to present something more interesting and newer, we could not make another presentation on the same area of before because it reminded us of our previous mistakes; so, we needed to make something good, something better, and we did. In this term, we chose to our presentation about LIGO thanks to our physics teacher who gave us the idea for it, and it was really our life saver, thanks teacher! And so, we started working and researching about this interesting gravitational wave observatory which was the observatory that proved that gravitational waves did in fact exist. And everyone got their job fast, Tomás Taborda oversaw the English Themes, Gonçalo Pardal oversaw LIGO itself and Rodrigo managed the physics part of our presentation which was Gravitational Waves and Neutron Stars.

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Alongside our research, we also did a 3D model for the LIGO facilities in Livingstone USA, Tomás Taborda was the one who oversaw it, and we believe that it turned out good.

 

After a very good month of being inside our homes and researching, we finished everything one week before the presentation which was good for us because we had a lot of time to prepare ourselves, but this time everything went great! On the day of the presentation, we did great, and we think we redeemed ourselves for our last term, everyone was speaking good in English and fluently, we were nervous at the beginning but then it faded away. After that presentation, we felt good with ourselves and proud of us for it! It really was our best presentation until then.

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In the third term, we were proud of our previous work, but we needed to work even better in this term. We chose a topic that was really like LIGO but fundamentally different, which was LISA, which is a concept for a satellite that detects Gravitational Waves scheduled to launch in the early 2030’s, which stands for Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which is basically LIGO but in space, which is actually very different.

 

In this term, everything went really great as well, we didn’t have problems at all, but if we had to tell some problems about our work in this term, we would say the website itself, because before this website we were doing a website about LISA only, after some guidance from the English Teacher, we quickly found out that we were wrong and that we had to make a new website about everything we had worked on, which is this exact website. We were frustrated to see our previous work being literally thrown to the trash itself, it was really heart breaking, but we surpassed our frustration and kept on with our work.

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But before the website itself, we had to do research and make a poster to spread our project idea to the world, that was an idea of the English Teacher and we were excited for it. Back to the research, quickly everyone found out their own way, Tomás Taborda oversaw LISA itself, Gonçalo Pardal ran the explanation of the Theory of Relativity, which is a very deep subject, but he really knew how to take care of that deep subject and make it simpler while interesting. These topics chosen by us were the ones that were connected to LISA itself, and without them the project would not be the same.

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With our research, we created a Homemade Interferometer as well that could be a help to explain better Interferometry itself and it was interesting and fun to do it. We made it thanks to our Physics Teacher who gave us the fundamental materials to do it, which were: the laser itself, one mirror, one two-side mirror and a divergent lens; so, we must once again show our appreciation to the Physics teacher for helping us with our interferometer. Thanks teacher!

 

After a lot of research and planning, we finally finished our presentation plans and we had pretty much everything ready to our presentation, the only things that were left were this website itself and the official version of our poster, because we already had made a poster, but we did not finish it and we had to make some adjustments.

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And so, it was the time for our presentation. In the day of the presentation, we were nervous, but it only was in the beginning, because after that we think that it really went well as well. We spoke normally and fluently which was our main goal. Although our presentation went well, we still had work to do, we still had to make the poster as well as this website.

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We started off with working on the poster, we initially made just one but later we had to make one more as well, and so we had two versions of the basically same poster, a horizontal version, and a vertical version of the poster, which we think it looked good and fundamentally clean.  After that, we started working on the website we mentioned before, the one that was basically thrown to the trash bag itself and so we started to make this one, which in our opinion we think it looks better that the previous one, and for that we are really proud of ourselves and grateful for this amazing chance that the teachers gave us with this subject, With this unique subject, we allowed ourselves to work even more and better, thanks to it we could be the best worker version of ourselves. We improved skills and idea as well language and vocabulary. We learned so much and we honestly think that we will never forget this amazing experience!