Tag Archives: Ms. Willemse

Week 9 of the Student Blogging Challenge

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This week’s Student Blogging Challenge was all about coding. Now, I didn’t know much about code other than the stuff we did on Swift Playgrounds in Grade 8. This was super fun, so I did all the challenges!

The First Challenge was about posting a comment for Alex. Alex is a coder who works for Incsub. He is visually impaired, and works with having sites readable for visually impaired individuals. I think it’s really cool how he hasn’t let anything get in his way of achieving his goal. This was my comment.

Fingers crossed for a response! I’ll update this if I get one.

The next thingamajig I did was the Hour of Code activity. In this, we pretty much went on this website and did a coding activity. I decided to do the flappy birds one, because I thought it looked cool.

This one was pretty easy to understand, easy enough that I got it right away. You had to have commands and stuff. It was pretty cool.

In the end, I got to code my own Flappy Birds game! Try it out!

I also got a certificate, which was pretty awsome.

The final task was to do some HTML coding. So, I decided to manually make links for this post!

Usually, I would just select the text, press link, and put in the URL. What I did this time was more time consuming, but was a lot more fun. I used the cheat sheet from the SBC challenge to help me out.

Yup, it was very time consuming. But now, if something ever happens to thiw website, I’ll know what to do. Until then, I think I’m gonna stick with the link button!

Santa Goes Skydiving!

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It’s beginning to look a lot like the holidays! It is soon the time for Christmas, Hanukkah and many others. My mom’s favourite holiday is solstice, on December 21st, but we still celebrate Christmas. For this week’s challenge, I decided to find a holiday game and write a review for it. The first game was Santa Map Dive on Google Santa Tracker!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This was a really fun game. The objective was clear, and it was very holiday based. It was cool having control of Santa, who resides over this holiday. What was really annoying was that the controls weren’t great, so moving Santa was extremely difficult. My friend tried it and Santa ended up spinning in a circle. Great game though. Good for older kids. Try it an tell me in the comments what you thought of it!

Gerald and Norbert!

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So for this week’s task, it was kinda interesting. We had either a week to catch, up or a free choice. I decided to do free choice because I’ve finished all the other ones. And I also decided to make an animation!

This is a story about Gerald and Norbert. Gerald and Norbert are in love, and, well, anyways, just watch the video. 

I made this using a super simple tool called FlipaClip. It’s very user friendly, and you get to make awesome little animations. For the music I used Splice, and voila. Now you can make your own animations!

Live Loops!

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This past week, we’ve been working with a medium we haven’t really in the past: Music. 

Garage Band is a really cool app where you can make awesome music. It’s really simple. You just go to garage band, create a new project, and go to live loops!

Once you’re in live loops, you can play around with it. You honestly can’t make a mistake. Anyone can make music using live loops. I really like the Rock loops.

One really awesome way to customize your songs is to add different loops to it. You can add different instruments, sounds, and even vocals to your tracks.

To make my song, I used the Rock loops. Adding different sounds, I customized it to make my own great tune!

I had a lot of fun with this project. Now that I know how to make easy music, I can enhance my videos even more.

Week 6; Science

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This week was science! I love science. One of the sciences I am most interested in is entomology, so I decided to complete task one and learn some more about it!

Hoverfly in Alyssum Todd Petit via Compfight

Entomology is the study of insects, but that term is to specific. Entomology also studies things such as arachnids, slugs, and earthworms. It is a branch of zoology, which is in the category of Life Sciences. 

William Kirby is considered the ‘father of entomology’. In 1815, he and William Spence wrote the first popular book on the subject, An Introduction To Entomology. In 1833, Kirby and Spence founded the Entomological Society of London, where he housed over 35 insect specimens.

Sweat Bee and Bee Todd Petit via Compfight

A majority of professional entomologists in Canada are employed by the government. They work with Agriculture Canada and Forestry Canada.

Entomology is an amazing type of science, one that has helped society improve science, crops, and medicine. 

The 3rd task looked fun, so I did it too.

This video is from TedEd and was created by Science Insider. I thought it was really informative, and it talked about whales. I love whales. 🐳

After watching the video, here are a few questions you can answer in the comments. Good luck!

  1. Which trees are the best growers?
  2. How tall are giraffes?
  3. What type of dinosaur was the tallest?
  4. Why can sea creatures grow bigger?
  5. How long is a lions mane jellyfish?

I also did the fifth task. Have a go at it, and good luck!

Week 5: Music!

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For this week’s challenge, we are getting to know each other. I decided to do the 4th task, the music task! The task was to explain what your favourite type of music was!

My favourite type of music is Folk Rock. I got into this type of music at Kaslo Jazz Fest, after hearing Shakey Graves. From there, I discovered The Avett Brothers, and many others. Here’s a cool Spotify playlist that features them!

One of my favourite songs right now is Morning Song by The Avett Brothers. I really like the vibe of the song, and the melody.

What are your favourite types of music? I want to know about my readers!

Week 4: Emoji Challenge

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This week’s task was about emojis. I decided to do two challenges for this week.

The first challenge I chose was the emoji math challenge. For this, I wanted to make an emoji sudoku game. See if you can figure it out!

The other challenge I wanted to do was the emoji story challenge. Using byrdseed.com, I got an emoji writing prompt. The emojis I got were as follows.

This is my story.

Once upon a time there was a man named Ned. Ned lived in a van, and traveled all around the world in this van. But after a few years, Ned got tired of traveling. He wanted to make some friends. So he signed up for the Ice-Cream tour, a 21 day train excursion around Alabama. On his first day, he met Paul, the talking horse. Paul loved to sing, but he was awful. Ned had to look away when Paul sang. Ned knew Paul thought himself to be a great singer, and Ned didn’t want to let him down. But on day 20, Ned couldn’t take it anymore. He told Paul that when he sang, he sounded like a camel dying. Paul just laughed. He knew he was a horrible singer the entire time, he just wanted to know if Ned would be honest with him. After the train excursion ended, Paul went with Ned and they traveled the world. Ned was lonely no longer. The end.

Commenting on Others Posts!

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For this week’s Student Blogging Challenge, as well as writing a commenting guideline, we had to comment on 3 different peoples posts. I chose three random people, and away I went. 

The first blog I commented on was The Life Without “R”… by Raegan Riley. I chose to comment on this blog because I thought it was cool how they went about doing the challenge. Instead of doing a graphic, as I did, they wrote about quality comments. 

This is a quality comment because of a few things. Firstly, I formatted the comment as a letter. Second, I complimented their blog and said what I liked about it. Finally, I gave them some feedback. 

The second blog I commented on was Celeste’s Blog. I wanted to comment on their blog because I thought it was super cool that they completed this on paper, instead of doing it on a device. 

I though this was a good comment, because it was formatted like a letter, along with the first comment. I also asked a question, that may start a conversation. I hope, if they hadn’t thought of doing it in an app, that I can tell them about some cool apps they can use. 

The last blog I commented on was Preston’s Blog. This was a really cool post. I wanted to comment on Preston’s blog because I really liked their graphic. 

This was a quality comment for several reasons. It was formatted as a letter. Also, I tried to help Preston by pointing out how I saw it as blurry. 

I hope my comments help these people, and that they start conversations!

BORSCHT! A Story

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Recreating videos is hard. But this project matched it. Welcome to; Project Live Event. 

For this project, we had to film a live event. This is really useful, because a lot of the time when we go on field studies, like Calgary and Ottawa, we need to film stuff that is happening in the moment. Now, unlike the Recreation Video Project, we only have one chance to get that perfect shot. 

You can’t really use a storyboard, because you can’t be 100% sure of what is going to happen, and when. So instead, we made an Action Plan. Using Notes, we wrote down all the shots and points we wanted to capture. This was very helpful, because we knew what to film, and while editing, we knew what shots we had to work with. 

I decided to film Borscht: A Story because I thought it would have a very interesting story and, well, it would be fun. And it was! I love borscht, and making borscht, so it combined my interests with a school project. My mom was great about it too, so it worked out great! Except we had a bit of an issue with the slowcooker, which you will see in the video. 

Then, it came time to edit, using iMovie. This was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Turned out, I actually had about 20 minutes of footage, and the videos could only be 2 minutes long. I had to cut a lot of footage, and trim the stuff I had. In the end, I did get it to 2 minutes, but just barely. 

Honestly, I was pretty happy with my first draft. Other than the music, which I though didn’t really match, it turned out great. I never got any critique, so I just edited it slightly and bam. Draft two.

I had a lot of fun with this project. Other than the slightly stressful part about only having one shot, it was a really cool project. I definitely learned a lot, and I’ll be able to use these skills on our next field study!

Copyright Free Images

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For this week’s task, I decided to make my own image. Making your own image is a great way to avoid any risk of copyright infringement. I made this image using Sketches Pro, but there are many other apps you can do this with. By making your own images, you can tell the story in the way you want it to be told, and to use your creativity.