PRESENTING FINAL

Today was the final day of presenting. The first group that went was really funny, and the second group was really cool. We went last and I think we did good. I really liked this project; and even though it was a bit stressful I'd love to do something like it again. It was very informational and helped me and hopefully everyone improve their understanding of ancient Greece. Here is our paper we will be giving to Mr. Schick tomorrow:

Naval Warfare in Ancient Greece

For our project, we chose to research naval warfare in Ancient Greece. Throughout researching, I’ve learned a lot about naval battles, weaponry and the logistics of the ships that were used. To research, we read about naval battles, some battles in the Peloponnesian War, weaponry used in the Greek Navy, and the backbones and parts of naval warships, especially the trireme. From this research, we were able to create our presentation, and conjure an idea for our visual, which is a model oar, meant to resemble an oar used by oarsmen on the trireme

To research our project, we researched battles from Greek naval wars, weaponry, and naval warships. We found very reliable websites in order to successfully find information. We put this information into our PowerPoint and we will use it in our presentation. We used a lot of websites including YouTube for a video in our presentation. We have also made a huge effort to learn the material as much as possible. This will aid us in answering any questions posed by our peers and over all help us to give a better presentation. We hope our efforts help us to get a good grade, as well as teaching our peers about Ancient Greek naval warfare.

For our visual, we made an oar, meant to imitate an oar used on the Greek naval warship, the trireme. The oars on those ships were usually about 3 meters long and very large and powerful. There were about 170 oarsmen on the ship at one time making the ship move, along with the sail. Although we couldn’t make a 3 meter long oar, and make multiple of them, we did our best to resemble what an oar may have looked like. By trying to imitate it the best we could, we used only 3 pieces, and to make it, we used as little electricity as possible, to truly understand how the Greeks did it. They must of had a system, but to get it right, it took us about an hour and a half, which is a long time! Our other visual was a weapon which would have been placed on ships in the early first millennium. Greek fire. Greek fire was a liquid like substance which could be expelled at enemy ships and used to set them alight and stick to anything, sort of like napalm. Now, the recipe for greek fire was a closely guarded secret, in fact we only can guess at what the stuff was. Even the atom bomb was discovered (in addition to knowing how to make it) through its development. But, modern historians do have an idea. They believe it was a sort of naphtha. Now naphtha is close to gasoline, so I we used gasoline with styrofoam to create a fluid-jelly like substance that would resemble greek fire. This immediately lit up and was successful. The second thing we tried was a mixture you’ve probably used but never heard of. Potassium Nitrate with Sulfur and Charcoal. AKA Sparklers. We combined this with alcohol to propel it and also to light it.

We’ve all worked very hard on this and we’ve put a lot of effort into making sure our material is understandable and comprehensible to our peers as well as Mr. Schick. We’ve made sure to include all sorts of media and information to broaden our peers knowledge and to broaden ours. It was difficult to find reliable information at first, but we were eventually able to find what we needed. Our next step was to create a tangible (or intangible) item that we could present to the class; which was very hard for us. Our topic was so big, and we originally had ideas that were to large-scale and quite honestly, hazardous, which made our choices very broad, and harder to find. We eventually made the connection between oars on warships and naval warfare, for without those, the warships would be very slow and much less powerful. Once again, to give our peers as much of an authentic and educational experience, we decided to make the oar as much to scale as we could. Though it wasn’t easy finding the measurements and making the oar look like it did centuries ago, we were able to accomplish it. We are truly proud of the work we have produced and we hope it is educational and worthy enough of a good grade.