Cycle of Poverty

1. What factors can lead to poverty? There are a bunch of factors that can lead to poverty. A lot of them fit under the 4 categories of Geography, Health, House and Family, and Education. Just because none of those categories are directly related to income, doesn’t mean they don’t lead to poverty. Usually, all other factors can somehow be put into one of those categories.
2. What circumstances can fuel long-term poverty? There are a bunch of them. It’s usually in the same categories that I listed in the previous question. I’d say it’s most common that if you have poor parents then usually you won’t get what you need to get a decent job. It’s hard to get a college degree without having the money for a sufficient education. It’s also tough if you live in a tough area where maybe it’s not particularly safe. Maybe you have to pay for expensive medications a lot.

Classroom Economy – Summary of Learning

1. As someone in this experience, tell your story.  Describe your experience. Tell us about the highs and the lows.  What were your major takeaways? What did you learn? How did you like it?  Be sure to explain your answers.

At the beginning of this Classroom Economy, we randomly chose our jobs. I was given the Seat Engineer role. All of the jobs had the potential to pay from 150 dollars to 4000 dollars. I was paid 170 dollars a week. Not a great situation. Then we picked our seating arrangements. I got stuck with the toilet (no literally). Throughout the first few weeks, I successfully avoided all fines, paid the minimum amount for rent, and completed my job perfectly. For me, this continued until basically the end of the classroom economy. My income stayed consistent while I saw others around me get evicted, get fired, and even get hyper-tension. I got none of it. Right before our classroom economy ended I passed the GED test and got 2000 dollars from finding the mistakes in my classmate’s blog posts for money. None of that went into effect before our classroom economy ended but I still ended in a pretty good spot. The Classroom Economy was fun while it lasted.

2. How did your character’s role/situation in the game affect your ability to take care of yourself?  Think about your income, job, rent, the amount of money you had, any loans you took out, and your health situation.

Because I was not making a large amount of money, I had to pay around 60% of my weekly paycheck on rent and such, not leaving me with much money left. I also sat on a toilet (which was not so bad) and had to argue super hard against every single fine against me. 

3. What aspects of your character’s life encouraged success?  What aspects of your character’s life brought about failure?  Explain how that process worked.

My character’s life definitely encouraged failure but because I am a super determined dude I persevered and fought through it. Also, literally in my job description, it said I was easily replaceable so there was that. My job itself may have encouraged success purely because it wasn’t particularly hard. All I had to do was stack chairs, after all.

4. What attempts did you make to improve your character’s life?  How successful were these attempts? How difficult were those attempts and why?

I tried numerous things. They ranged all the way from fraud to starting my own Ponzi scheme (otherwise known as a pyramid scheme). Suffice to say, none of it was successful. Eventually, I just gave up and started begging Kaufman to give me more money. And it worked!

5. In bullet points, write a list of what you learned about poverty from this activity.  Be sure to include a brief description next to each item about what you learned, explaining your learning/thinking.

  • How much rent costs
  • How evictions work
  • What the poverty line is
  • All about utilities (gas and electrical)
  • How to sign a paycheck
  • Interviewing for a job
  • Ceo vs. Regular income
  • How to file taxes

Second Attempt at Building a Racer

1. Given the challenge and the performance of your car on Test Drive #1, what change(s) did you make for Test Drive #2? We made our back part of our “car” bigger because the more mass it has the more kinetic energy it takes with it.
2. What differences did you predict these changes would make in your car’s performance? What makes you think this? We predicted this would make our car much faster and it would go farther.
3. Think about the variables such as the size of the spool, weight of the washer or tension of the rubber band. How might these affect how far or how fast your car will go? The more mass, the more kinetic energy the vehicle has. We also extended our rubber band which made our car have more elastic energy.
4. What worked better the second time? Our entire car worked better the second time seeing as it went farther and faster.
5. What still is not quite working? We still weren’t able to get the car to roll much after its first impact with the ground. It did more sliding than rolling.
6. What questions do I have? How is it possible to make this vehicle better?
7. What might I try next? I think I would try and minimize the Duct Tape so as to increase the rollability of the vehicle.
8. Explain the energy transfer that is taking place in the racer. The racer starts with a bunch of elastic energy and as it’s used up it’s being converted to kinetic energy and using the kinetic energy to slide on the ground.

Racer Ideas and Plan

1. What do you like about your initial design? I really like the fact that it works and moves in the intended direction. That’s a far cry from many of the other groups.
2. What has been challenging about the initial design? Just figuring out how we were going to power it and get it to move with just rubber bands.
3. How well did your racer perform in the first race? Did it go far? Fast? In the first race, our racer went both the fastest and farthest out of all legal vehicles.
4. How will you modify your design for the second race? Why? Not sure yet. I’m still thinking about how we can make our design more effective. I think I just have to look at the independent variables and see what we can modify.
5. What have been your strengths and challenges during the design process? Our strengths have been coming up with ideas. We have never really been at a loss for what to do. Our challenges have been committing to one idea.
6. What questions do you have? How can we make our design better?