Jez's Blog

As we all knew that the four factors, which are geography, society, economy, and technology, cause a civilization to rise. Therefore, by looking at a several of ancient civilizations, you may notice that for most of them, had similar geographies (such as rivers), social organizations (such as class systems), economy (such as trading), and technological skills (such as irrigation). However, in this article, it will be focusing on one of the four factors, technology.

I picked the technology of Egyptian Civilization to compare the technology of the Mayan Civilization. Both of these civilizations had developed their own counting systems/math skills. Even though these counting systems/math skills were different, both Mayan and Egyptian Civilization were able to use these skills to measure, to build. Therefore, they had both developed their building skills of their typical architectures. In which I'd like to mention that they had similar-looking pyramids; and these pyramids were used for a similar purpose as well --- in both civilizations, the leaders were buried under the pyramids. But, there were also some differences between the pyramids of the two civilizations. In the Egyptian Civilization, a pyramid might was simply a memorial of a Pharaoh. But a pyramid in the Mayan Civilization, it could be used as a calendar, a temple, or the place where ceremonies were hold.

Besides the development of math and architectures, city planning was also one of the main technological developments of a civilization. The Mayan Civilization, was well organized into city states, unlike the Egyptian Civilization, the Mayan Civilization was not a unified civilization. And so, obviously, the two civilizations would had different kinds of governments. Unlike the Egyptian Civilization, which only had one king at a time, the Pharaoh, the Mayan Civilization had different rulers being in charge of each city states in a time.

As a result, technologies of some ancient civilizations could be quite similar to each other, yet different from each other as well. Differences showed us the typical characteristics of each civilizations, and the similarities surprised us because it made us wonder how was it possible.

We all live in the yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine...

During last Tuesday's SMASH day, our mission was to build a periscope to see what's inside a box, which was placed on the table, from under the table. The materials for building the periscope were papers, card boards, scissors, tapes, and 4 mirrors.

Personally, I think this was the hardest SMASH day mission so far! Even though we've tried and kept on trying, for 1 hour. We kept changing the design of our periscope, and experimenting to see if it worked. But eventually, we still failed the mission. Oh, well, actually we semi-failed the mission because we could see inside the box, it's just that we couldn't recognize what the things were. I wonder if it was because the mirrors in our periscope were placed in a wrong way so they weren't reflecting effectively. :[