Istra Trip

From 4th of June to 8th of June, yr12 was planned to go to Istra for group 4. All students had to be at school until 8:50 and as soon as students all arrived to school, we helped move equipments and bags to the school bus. Afterwards, students rode on the bus and it took about 2 hours to get Istra.

At Istra, firstly, we arranged our stuffs to an allocated room. My roommate was Aina. We unpacked stuffs then when we got downstairs, we were told to find some flags in the forest. It was the first time we got into the forest at Istra so it was confused where to go. There were so many mosquitos in the forest. I felt that I won't see this many mosquitos in the rest of my life. My group, the girls, found 5 flags and after Mr Oconnor checked the pictures of the flags, we went to eat lunch. After lunch time, students were introduced the conference room where we would work and meet for the rest of Istra trip. Moreover, at Istra, students needed to draw the map of the forest and biology and ESS students were also needed to find 9 different leaves at Istra. After we finished drawing the map and collecting leaves, we went back up to the conference room and figured out the name of the species and features of the leaves.

I also did water tesing on Nitrate with Sang Hoon and Thibaut. The 2 places of the pond had been chosen and collected water. The Nitrate level did not have much different in two areas. Then we went to reservoir and again, selected 2 places. The result was that the Nitrate level seems to appear higher in the deep water.
Additionally, I had learned how to do quadrats in school. And at Istra, I did elevation and quadrat. It was hard to set up the places and to count the species. Both activities took long time to finish and when we were done, our group went up to the conference room and learned how to draw a graph for the elevation and quadrat.

On Thursday, all students had to do their own experiment. I decided to do the detail of the quadrat that I did the day before. I generated 12 random numbers and with quadrat, I counted the number of the dandelions, soil moisture, temperature of the soil at the same depth and more over, for more cocised pH level test, I collected some soil and put those into the sample bags. Before BBQ, I dried the soil out and took the soil test kit with me to finish the experiment on not only pH but also nitrate, phosphorus and potassium.

We had Barbeque for dinner and we all had a great time and the food tasted good. Students played with a ball and also played football in the football court near the BBQ. Later, we played a game with a torch. I don't exactly remember the name of the game but students had to run and hide from people who had the torch. If the students were enlightened by the torch and were called their name, they could not run anymore and got caught. However, if the people with the torch did not call the name of the person wrong, the person could still run without being caught. While we were playing this game it started to rain heavily and it made the people with the torch hard to recognise the people. For example, Mr Oconnor could not recognise me even though I was running in the field where there was not even a tree.:D It was fun and everyone seemed felt the same as me.

On friday we should pack up our stuffs and get ready to leave the Istra.

• It was worthy to be there because I did a lot of experiment which I had not done before.So I have undertaken new challenges.
• It was collaborative work with other students becuase besides the individual experiment, I needed to work with my team. 
• My individual work was initiated and planned activity. 
• Moreover, after BBQ, all students cleaned up the mess so it is also considering the ethical implications of my actions. 
• Through this trip, I developed my new skills as well such as Simpson's diversity Index.