Tag Archives: school

STAR Writing Test

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Well, today was the STAR writing test. As I walked into my 1st period classroom, I noticed pencils and paper on the desks. Mrs. Evans passed out the test booklets and read the directions to us. I was mildly nervous about the test, but the suspense was killing me. What was the prompt going to be about? Would I be able to write a lot about it?

Directions: “Write a fictional narrative. [...] Be sure to develop your plot, setting and characters.”

The prompt: “Imagine you have moved to a city under the sea. The next day you decide to explore. Write a story about what happens next.”

A fictional narrative. Just like in 4th grade. I didn’t do as good as I would have liked that time. [hmph]

This time, though, I think I did much better. :-) I wrote about a underwater city called Atlantis IV, which was contained in a glass semisphere filled with air (sort of like BioSphere 2). I had found an airlock to go outside and met up with an octopus. Then I wrote about how I almost got eaten. LOL

Lunchtime. Will post later.

AMC-10 and CAML results

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Today I found out my scores on the AMC-10 and California Mathematics League.

On the AMC-10 I got 111.5 out of possible 150 points, which is significatly higher than lots of other people in the class (including 8th graders). The other 7th graders (namely Tony, Felix, and Timothy) beat me by a few points, and all the top 8th graders (Steven Liao, Daiwei, Patricia, Archit, etc.) scored close to perfect!

CAML: I only got 36 out of 40. [shy] I won’t get the paper back until 2 weeks later. Something interesting…the contest designers say that anyone with a score of 15 or above is “to be commended”, so I guess that’s everyone in our class! LOL

I wonder what I got on the previous Math FAX? One of the problems asked for “the area of the cylinder, in terms of [tex]pi[/tex]“. Surface area or volume?

Science fair project: Internet-Based Distributed Computing

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My science fair project this year, for the Synopsys Championship 2005 is going to be about Internet-based distributed computing. Here’s an excerpt from my research plan…

BACKGROUND. Distributed computing (DC) is the process of using multiple computers to approach a complex and lengthy task. Internet-based DC normally involves many client computers connected to a server that will coordinate the clients. The server breaks up the main task into many smaller, more manageable parts for each client to compute. When a client finishes, it sends the results back to the server. The server will recombine all the results when the task is complete. DC has many advantages over traditional linear computing, which does one thing at a time. The first and most obvious benefit is speed. Since DC splits up a large task, many computers can work on it at the same time. Additionally, using DC is much more reliable, because if one client crashes, another client will simply take over its part. Continue reading →

JACL math contest

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Today I took the 38th annual San Jose JACL — Tokutomi Math Contest at Santa Teresa High School.

It took up pretty much the whole day–I arrived at 12:15 or so and hung out with everyone else there until the actual contest started at around 1 PM.

Unfortunately, the test-taking conditions were horrible, because we were located in an auditorium. There were wooden theater-style seats with tiny fold-out desks, maybe one and a half feet square, at most. Actually, they turned out not to be so bad, but full-size desks would have been nice.

The problems were actually harder than I had expected. I got 14 out of 20, which wasn’t too bad, but I could’ve done better. That put me in 3rd place for 7th grade. Tony came in 2nd, and Timothy came in first. Notice all three of us were from Miller! B-D Daiwei won best of the junior division (7th and 8th graders I think), and he got this huge plaque.

The whole event took me 1 hour transportation round-trip + 1 hour waiting + 1 hour test taking + 1 hour listening to solution + 1 hour awards ceremony = 5 hours total. I didn’t have anything else planned today, so it was a good day to spend the day. My 3rd place prize was a $2 Baskin-Robbins gift certificate, and with it I went and got a scoop of rocky road chocolate ice cream. :-9