Hello everyone!

This is my second to last Scimatics blog post for grade 8! Wow this year has really gone by fast i’m almost done my first high school year and it feels so crazy to almost be finished. So about this project. This project was mostly math based and a lot of the math was things we already had learned but, we basically just learned more about how to calculate different shapes and just learned more about the concept in general.

So I’ve mentioned a math concept -your line: what’s the concept Sydney?- well, the concept is… calculating surface area and volume! The end goal for this project was designing a shape that either had more volume or surface area. It’s a little weird because I haven’t mentioned what our driving question was yet and usually those are the main focus but, for this project we got to create our own driving questions and that was milestone 1 and that would be the perfect Segway into talking about the milestones of this project but instead I want to talk about the curricular competencies (I will talk through the milestones later though). 

Applying and innovating: Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through personal or collaborative approaches.

This competency for Scimatics is about how you focus in class and wether or not your distracted or distracting other while their trying to work. I think I’m pretty good at not talking in class I will admit that I do sometimes get a bit distracted by things but I try my best to ignore it. I think an area (ha get it cause this project was about surface area) that I could improve on is finding ways to help me focus even when the class is loud for example using headphones and turning on a white noise or something along those lines.

Reasoning and Analyzing: Model mathematics in contextualized experiences.

For this project this competency was about  design a 3D object that had 10 basic 3D shapes using the tinker cad app. I believe that my shape was very good, I used relatively complicated objects in my design and I had a lot of different shapes. Though there is always area for improvement and I think I could’ve added a few more shapes that were completely different and not just one shape in a different position. Even though it wasn’t in the criteria I think I should’ve made my shape a little prettier especially since one of the critiques I received was that my hot tub looked a bit like a dishwasher.

Communicating and Representing: Explain and justify mathematical ideas and decisions.

For this project this competency was about our measurements/calculations and how much detail we put into our final presentation and how we compared the surface area vs the volume. I think my calculations were very precise and I only had one correction I needed to make and that was just the conversion I did. I think I went in depth about my calculation and ratios in my presentation but, I think I could’ve spent a little more time taking about how I got the end results for my project I also think I should’ve explained a bit more about why I chose the driving question I did.

Milestone 1: Driving Question

This milestone is pretty self explanatory as we just created our driving question. Mr Gross gave us an example question with a space that we could fill in. During the project I found that I didn’t like my driving question so I changed it. It went form; ‘How can I design a swimming pool so that it is has maximum volume’ to ‘How can I design a hot tub so that it has maximum surface area?’. Like you’ll see in my presentation I should’ve kept the volume part of the first question.

Milestone 2: Models and Formulas

This milestone was where we handed in what our completed model looked like and the formulas that we would use in our calculations I had eight different formulas here they are:

I’m not going to show my model yet because I don’t want to spoil it for the presentation. 

Milestone 3: Calculations 

This milestone was just adding in the numbers to the formulas we found/wrote down. The only mishap I had with this milestone was that I didn’t convert the millimetres squared/cubed to meters squared/cubed correctly because when I went to convert them I thought I should’ve just converted millimetres to meters but my teacher corrected that. Otherwise my calculations were fine. Here they are: 

Milestone 4: Tinkercad Model

We skipped over this milestone for our project because it was just 3D printing the model out or building a replica of the model using cardboard so, we just skipped to milestone 5.

Milestone 5: Presentation

Now this is the moment you’ve all been waiting for… Our presentation!!! I’m going to put the keynote of our presentation below because unfortunately we don’t any videos of us presenting. Now you might be wondering why I’ve been writing like I’m 2 people well, it’s because I had a partner in this project her name’s Naomi. So, without further ado I hope you enjoy our presentation!

Ultimate Design Project Presentation

I hope you liked the presentation it would probably be more entertaining in person but, whatever. I also hope you enjoyed reading about my second to last Scimatics project in grade 8. See you next time!

Thanks again for reading -Sydney🙃

Hello everyone!!!

It’s been way too long since I’ve written a blog post. This project is our second to last project for this year (noooooooooo!) and it’s about the causes and consequences of European exploration. If you didn’t know I greatly enjoy reading and my favourite genre is fantasy and by association pirates. You might be wondering what does pirates have to do with this project Sydney? well, this project is called argh, Matey so even though the driving question was: What were the causes and consequences of global exploration? Pirates were a part of that (and Mr Hughes really likes pirates). 

The final product for this project was a story book thing about the European exploration using the ARmaker app. For this project we started out like usual by understanding what it is in general then we started drawing things that we thought might have been a part of our story for example a treasure chest. 

Then we started to fiddle with ARmaker. We started by just exporting a random image and testing out how to place things and make them bigger so that people can see them well enough. I definitely had a few mishaps while testing this out.

Now that we had the skills for ARmaker we started the writing/story portion of this project. When we started we barely had any knowledge of this subject so some of our stories were pretty crazy but, our teacher kept reminding us that we needed to be open to change our stories because as we learned more info about European exploration we would need to change our stories. This was my first storyboard: 

To write our stories we needed to know more about what the heck the European exploration entailed so we got a few lectures on what it was about. Here’s a few photos during the lectures and all my notes (some of them might not make a lot of sense, even to me!):

Another piece of the building knowledge phase for this project was doing the iron chef protocol the person me and my classmate Francis had to research for this activity was Amerigo Vespucci here’s our work:

Since we were writing fictional stories we needed to learn what historical fiction is. So what is it? “the genre of literature, film, etc., comprising narratives that take place in the past and are characterized chiefly by an imaginative reconstruction of historical events and personages.”  -Dictionary.com

We talked about what movies, books, tv shows, ect… had historical fiction in them and then we talked about how we could potentially incorporate those ideas into our stories.

So, now we’ve had lectures to build our knowledge, we’ve written out our story boards to the best of our abilities, we’ve done a couple of drawings so, what’s next? Well, now its time to get into the nitty gritty of the project. That means filling down our stories so they fit all the criteria, finalizing our drawings and then adding all of that into ARmaker. To help us out with all of this our teachers gave us a check list of all the things we needed to begin filming. This is it:

Ok, now we’re in the final stretches. We needed to start filing so, we took a little trip to Cates park so we could film outside. And the most exiting part was WE GOT PIRATE PAKS!!! (Thank you teachers for organizing it😃) It was really fun having a pirate pak lunch with my friends here’s some pictures of us at Cates: 

(Thank you to Caden, Judah, Hannah and Brooke and a bunch of my class for being in those photos. Go check out their blogs!)

Now it’s time for some school work. We got into groups with grade 10 leaders and set off to film our videos it felt like I did 100 takes because almost every time something went wrong for example I sneeze right in the middle of recording or, I majorly flub my lines even though I had a script right in front of me although it was very difficult because I had my phone on my iPad so I could barely see what the camera as seeing and I had to hold 2 devices at the same time blah, blah, blah, I eventually got a decent take so that’s what you’ll be viewing now, enjoy!

I hope you enjoyed watching and listening to me talk well, it’s more write than talk but whatever.

Thanks for reading -Sydney🙃

Hello everyone!

This is my second blog post about Destination Imagination (DI). We’re finally done, after a lot of work we finally went to the competition and presented our challenge solution. If your looking at your screen and wondering “what is this lady talking about?” Visit my previous DI post here. Ok now that your all caught up it’s time to wrap this project up for this year (because we do DI till grade 10).

So as you most likely know I was a part of one (of the two) improv groups, our team name was ‘Operation: Unplanned’ and unlike the last post I can finally talk about my challenge solution because I’ve presented it. Unfortunately I can’t talk about my. Instant challenge till sometime in may because if I do I risk disqualification for my team which would not be good.

This post is gonna wrap up my experience with DI and what I’ve learned through it and how I’ve grown as a learner. In this post I’m going to talk about how I contributed to my team to create our final solution. At the end of this post I’ll have a YouTube video of my challenge solution. I’m also going to be talking about the process that my team and I went through to have a successful first DI year.

My Teammates

I wanted to include a link to my teammates blog’s so you can check our all their work.

My teammates are:

Frankie

Silas

Gwenyth

Andrew

We had a pretty small group but it was fine because the less people you have in improv the easier it is.

What I’ve Learned

I think one of the main things I’ve learned through DI this year has been that when you work with people for something like this you need to get to know each other and set boundaries with your teammates because if you don’t then thing become chaotic. I think that me and my team should’ve made more of an effort to actually get to know each other because it’s so important when improving to know who your working with and how they do things. 

Another thing I didn’t really learn but kind of reinforced is that organization is SUPER important I don’t think my team would’ve made it to the end if we didn’t organize our thoughts and physical things (who’s driving, who’s brining boxes…). Organization is 100% something that I’m brining into next years DI.

My Growth

DI has forced me out of my comfort zone sometimes this year and it was a little scary sometimes because I didn’t always know what was happening. If you know me then you probably know that I like to control pretty everything but for DI this year sometimes I had to relinquish that control and I think that’s helped me really grow as a learner because now I know that I don’t have to micro manage everything for things to workout.

What Did I Contribute To My Team?

I think I contributed my organizational skills and my previous knowledge of improv to my team. Even though it was a team effort I think I took the head of keeping our basecamp organized, I made sure things were in the right folders and that we had all the documents we needed at the end of the day. I also brought my previous improv knowledge because through my years in acting I’ve done many improv games so I tried to help us get into the improv spirit whenever we were rehearsing.

The skills I mentioned helped us during our solution because since we were so organized we didn’t need to do anything last minute at the tournament and also since we had practiced our improv skills we were ready to do some improv at the tournament.

Our Process

We basically had the same first steps as the other teams because everyone was still trying to figure out what their challenge was and everything about it here were the major steps we took to have an amazing challenge solution: 

We learned about our challenge.

We memorized our rules.

Practiced instant challenges.

Communicated as a team.

Rehearsed our scenes.

We had an organized Basecamp.

We brainstormed ideas.

We came prepared to dress rehearsals.

We figured out how we were gonna get to the challenge.

We went to the tournament! 

Our Solution!

This is our final challenge solution. As I mentioned earlier I’m not allowed to share details of our instant and people weren’t even allowed to view it so I don’t hav a video of it but this is our challenge solution that we’d been work to for a while. So without further ado Operation’s a-go🤜

Random Media From The Entire Thing

This is our feedback from the challenge solution.

DI has been a little crazy, scratch that it was a lot of crazy but it was an overall really cool experience and I’m glad I did it.

Thanks for reading -Sydney🙃  

Hello everyone!

Today I’m going to be talking about the renaissance vs now (2022). This project was all about how things have changed from the renaissance time period and the lasting effects it’s had on current society. I was really excited to do this project because I haven’t gotten to do much history in school yet. 

The big end goal of this project was to create a triptych with lots of things on it and a big paragraph but I’ll get to those later in the post. This project was more English and history based than our previous humanities projects. We learned about how to compose paragraphs and we learned about the renaissance. 

We started off this project by doing a role-play like activity where the class drew what role they would play, there were: serfs, knights, lords, and a queen. The activity was supposed to show us what life was like for the different classes of people during the renaissance. Each class had a page of different instructions, I was a serf and here were my instructions:

We also created memes about inventions this was mine:

The launch of this project’s launch was really packed because we also created Venn diagrams comparing the feudal system and The Haudenosaunee system. I worked with Charlie and Naomi for this activity click their names to see their blogs. This was our Venn diagram:

Then we did this thing called the iron chef protocol where we had around 10 minutes to research a topic then we presented it to a panel of “judges” (it was us talking in bad British accents). I presented on the Black Death, this was what I did:

Then it was off to loon lake!!!! We didn’t do too much humanities there but we did do a little bit. We learned about what a NAME (Novelty, Applicability, Memory, Effect) chart is to help us create our final product. We used them to help us research the topic we thought was most historically significant. The activity was mostly for us to understand what a NAME chart was and how to write one. 

Now’s the point in the project that we started to do activity that were directly associated with out final pieces of work. The first was creating our triptych template, we did that by putting a picture of an open space (I did a theatre) into keynote and made it into three sections with two lines. The we made our first paragraph and handed it into Showbie so we could get feedback to make out final paragraph even better. Here’s my template and paragraph:

While we were at loon lake we also learned about some SuperimposeX techniques which were layering and masking. I made my cousin jump through a hoopla hoop and my bothther walk on water.

In this activity we learned some more SuperimposeX skills which were layering and blending. In that class we also created our research banks and our NAME charts. I chose to research William Shakespeare, the Primavera, the Match, and the rise of capitalism and banking.

Then we did a virtual tour of an art piece it was really cool seeing it in a 360 view. We also started our final paragraph and our triptych and filled out some of our growth chart for this project. 

Now it was time to close up this project. We took a virtual tour of the Sistine chapel and then we finished up our triptych and finally we work some more on our final paragraph (because it wasn’t due till that night).

Here’s my triptych and paragraph:

This project was really fun to do because we learned lots and I think it gave me a really good view on learning about history even though I didn’t have the best history teachers in elementary school. This project even made me re-think what I wanted to do with my career.

I hope you enjoyed reading about my project and I can’t wait to talk to all of you next post.

Thanks for reading – Sydney🙃