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Service Learning Reflection

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    This year my first year seminar class did a lot of service work inside and outside of the class room. Being someone that loves kids, I thought all of the activities we did were really fun. Meeting the kids that live in the community and thinking about how they could potentially be taking this seminar, doing the same things we were doing is crazy to think about. It was really fun to do different activities with all of the kids and help them do whatever the task was. Some of them were difficult, even for us college kids when we had to test them out, but the kids are really clever and caught onto what we were doing pretty quickly.    For some of the projects, we did a scavenger hunt/unlock the box with the kids. There were clues that one of us would give the group and from there they had to figure out the numbers/letters combination that would unlock each of the locks. We helped them through each part of it, but a lot of the kids understood how to do whatever th...
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Helping People Understand Science

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      Everyday new discoveries are being made and lots of articles being produced about these discoveries. The overwhelming amount of information can cause a lot of confusion for the public. A lot of the information that gets attention isn't actually true and even after scientists refute it, people hold onto it. Others are extremely stubborn and closed minded. There are lots of different factors that go into what a person believes and why they believe it. Today, the gap between the two sides of an argument are getting more polarized. Let's take environmental protection. In a survey conducted by  Pew Research , it's shown that Republican and Democratic opinions on what should happen has never been at a greater distance. It's important for people to understand what's actually happening and not believing everything they hear from any source.       Many people have a hard time understanding science because it's in terms they can't understand. These top...
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Scientists and the Public

   People will believe anything that they read now a days if they hear it from a scientist. A lot of the public have been given false information and it's been public knowledge that some scientists are paid by companies to falsify data or make a claim based off of poor data collection. This knowledge causes some people to not trust what scientists have to say; some will actually use the bias data to prove a point they want to make. There's so much information out there and it's difficult to know what's true and what isn't. Scientists interacting with the public and setting things straight is so important for a good relationship can be built with everyday citizens and scientists.    In our UCO we were lucky enough to have five scientists come into our class and talk to us about what they do. Dr. Sarah Carmichael is a geologist who studies the interactions between life and minerals. She takes samples of minerals from caves and looks at their properties to try and lik...
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Good vs Bad Graph

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I believe that the above image is an example of a good graph. It shows the units for both the x and y axis, it averages the temperatures which makes it more accurate and makes the data less skewed, but it still shows accurate information. The scale of the y axis is good and is not misleading. I believe that the above image is a bad graph because the graph's unit measurement of the y axis makes it look like there has been no change in the global temperature. It is a misleading graph and it would be a graph used for people to believe that the Earth's temperature has been stable.
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Wine to Water

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   On Thursday, September 6th, Wine to Water gave a presentation at Appalachian State University about what they do and more specifically, what they did for Nepal a couple of years ago.    Wine to Water is an amazing organization who does their best to supply water to developing countries. They put up wells in areas where civilians have to walk extremely far to get something that's such a basic necessity. Water insecurity is becoming a bigger problem globally with every passing year. This organization is doing everything that they can do to make people's lives easier. One example of how they did this was in Nepal.    In April of 2015, Nepal was hit by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. It was devastating to the country, especially considering people were already struggling before the natural disaster. Wine to Water was informed of the circumstances and asked if they could help. Unfortunately, it didn't seem that their efforts would be effective there. It look...
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A Love-Hate Relationship

   Ever since I was a little kid, I've wanted to help people. Whether it was something as simple helping my little sister tie her shoes or helping my mom cut out name tags for her students, I loved it. It's something that I've loved to do from a very young age and that love has only grown as I've gotten older. Science has also been something I've loved. Ever since I was a little girl I've wanted to be a nurse. I would get to learn about a topic I loved and help people while doing it!    Science has always been a major part of my life, but it really impacted me when I was diagnosed with a chronic auto-immune disease called Crohn's disease at 11. Now, science really took over my life. Learning what to do and what not to do when you have this disease, doing all the research I could to learn more about what it was and what I could do to try and stay healthy. Spending so much time in the hospital getting all these different tests done made me hate the hospital a...
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