Behind the SL-Scenes

This is my Student Led Conference, where I take a look back at the things I’ve done over the year and tell you guys the highlights.

The piece of work I’m the most proud of is my Mark Antony Body Biography. I know most of my classmates are gonna say their favourite was something big, like the Oregon trip or Destination Imagination, but for some reason, even though I worked in a group and was sick the day we were supposed to present, I think that I’m more proud of this project. This is probably because this project wasn’t a handful, so I didn’t want it to be successful as much as, for example Destination Imagination. I also think that this project was exactly what it was supposed to be and that my ideas helped it become like it was.

I think that the best example of my learning was the book we wrote on our Oregon trip. I can guarantee that almost nothing I wrote in there I knew before I visited that wonderful place.

I think that my best example of growth mindset was Destination Imagination. This is because, looking at the teams, the teams with the most enthusiasm usually scored higher. I think that my group, the inquisitors, owe our score to our (relatively good) enthusiasm and our ability to accept and expand on our teammate’s ideas.

I’m also gonna tell you guys about my three goals I want to achieve by the end of the year.

Goal number one: Get better at making it to school on time. My plan to achieve this goal is to go to bed earlier, and to achieve that perhaps try to eat dinner earlier.

Goal number two: To use my iPad’s reminder feature more. I don’t use my personal planner much because I know from personal experience that it never leaves my backpack and I always forget to check it. However I recently learned how to use the reminders feature so I will try to use that more for things like my homework. To achieve this goal I’ve left myself a top-priority reminder to use the feature more.

Goal number three: To decorate my locker. I hardly use my locker (I pretty much just use it to store my saxophone) but I still want to make it look nice. I’m probably going to decorate it with something weird, like magnets of the cover of Macintosh Plus – Floral Shoppe or many copies of a picture of a beige Pontiac Aztec (so that when people see me opening it they get really confused), but that’s ok, because it’s my locker and I can do whatever I want. My plan to achieve this is to leave a reminder to print my decorations at hom and then apply them artistically to my locker.

So this was my SLC, I hope you enjoyed and thanks for reading!

Oregon trip in review

Last December we at Navig8 went to Oregon on a field trip, and now we’ve been asked to write a blog post about it and the work that we did while doing it.

Let’s start with advertisements. Continuing on the project we were doing last term, we were to make three ads: a business ad, where we make an ad for a predetermined business, a tourism ad, where we make an ad for a predetermined tourist attraction, and an advocacy ad, where, due to the frequent earthquakes Oregon experiences, we were to make an earthquake awareness ad. Each business and tourist attraction was to have a group of five-ish students making separate ads for, and for our business ad we were to interview staff of the business we were advertising to help formulate our advertisements. Without further ado, let’s take a look at mine, and listen to what I say to defend their poor quality.

My tourism ad

I thought long and hard about this ad and still couldn’t think of anything better. It’s a nice picture, I suppose, but the text is a pun but not a joke, which makes it quite forgettable.

My business ad

The problem with this one is that when my group was supposed to be getting pictures of the campground we went to see what the nearby beach looked like in the hope that we could use it for our ads. Unfortunately we had ten minutes and it was a five minute walk, so I ended up not having many pictures I could use. I decided the picture I used here was my best bet and tried to think of something to write on top of it, and it ended up like this.

My advocacy ad

This ad has the same problem as the last one: I didn’t have any good pictures. Because these ads had to use pictures we took on the trip the only earthquake related pictures I had were tsunami warning signs and a picture Owen sent me of a tsunami warning flyer. So I ended up with a picture of a slightly windy beach with giant red text (which was a recommendation from a classmate) saying to me mindful of earthquakes and a link to a tsunami awareness website. Fantastic. In conclusion next time we have an advertising project I will make sure to take more useful pictures.

Apart from the things we created we also did some field studies. I’m not going to list all of them, because that would take forever, but I will talk about a few.

Our first field study was in Fort Stevens on the northwest tip of Oregon. In this historic war base we were given a tour of the many tunnels and fortifications. It was really interesting to see and hear about what happened in the Fort’s history an very cool to see the fire-scorched tunnels. My favourite parts were when we were inside because it was raining quite hard, which was very unpleasant.

The inside of Fort Stevens

I think the main purpose of this field study was to learn about the importance of the Columbia River and maybe learn a bit about the Civil War.

Another field study we did took place at the Hanthorn cannery. We had a look at the machinery and the museum and watched part of the movie they were playing. To be honest I don’t remember much of what we learned because this was a while ago and we didn’t write much about it, but I’m pretty sure we learned about the kind of fish they canned and how they did so. My favourite part was when we were taking pictures and I learned that while taking panoramic photos that it’s possible to twist your device around to take weird, twisty photos, like these:

A twisted panorama
Another twisted panorama (I like this one)

However I didn’t like the public washrooms. They look reminiscent of the scorched tunnels of Fort Stevens (who wants a public washroom that’s reminiscent of scorched tunnels?). I think the purpose of this field study was to learn about the link of the fishing trade and local cuisine.

Another field study we did took place at the Hatfield Marine Science Center. I’ll talk about one of them. For the first one we slurped some ghost shrimp out of the ground to analyze. We analyzed things like their gender and size, but most importantly we recorded which ones had a parasite on them. The ghost shrimp population was being terrorized by parasites that stopped the shrimp from reproducing. Our job as citizen scientists was to create data charts on how many shrimp were affected. My favourite part was slurping the shrimp out of the sand, which was satisfying, and that I could say that I’ve done this, because doing this inspired me to change the description of my Steam profile description to “the best experience of my life was when i slurped and sexed a bucked of shrimp” (when I say sexed I mean identified the gender of and no, I’m not going to add a link to my Steam profile. Imagine what would happen if a teacher added me! They would spend hours telling me to stop playing video games and do some homework), but I was kind of unnerved when I had to carry the shrimp to my examination group because people were getting pinched by the shrimp and I wanted to be careful. I think the purpose of this study was to learn about local species and to experience what it’s like to compile data.

In the end everything we did was put together in a book we made in Book Creator. Here’s mine.

First things first: the star next to the shrimp is “how I felt when I ate the food drawn over there” (well, those weren’t the exact instructions, but you know). Also apart from the cover and the first page (which is a screenshot of the Geometry Dash level eEon by Hotocot) all the art in the background was made by Mike Winkelmann.

I’d say I want to go back one day but probably not for the next four years. And on that bombshell, it’s time to end thank you so much for reading good night!

Julius Caesar Part One: Backgrounders

Recently us in the Navig8 program started our Shakespeare project, specifically our Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar project. But before we got into the play we were split into groups and told to research a character from the play and represent our knowledge by creating a body biography by cutting a life-sized human figure and representing what things mean to the character by attaching a paper representative of a part of their character to a specific type of their body. The attachments had to be made with paper, scissors, pens and pencils, tape and glue. For example, let’s say your character loved poetry. You could write a short poem and tape it to the paper figure’s heart. The finished product is taped to the cieling of the PLP classroom. The idea is it’s a great way to understand the cares and opinions of the character. Afterwards we were to present our creation in front of the class (which unfortunately I was absent for). It’s kind of hard to explain but maybe looking at what me and my group did will help.

I was grouped with Marshall Jessie and Lauren and we were assigned Mark Antony.


Our body biography.

This is our full biography. I’ll explain some of our additions, but not all, because that would be long and boring to read.

A Gallic warrior’s head.

We added a portrayal of a Gallic warrior’s head under his foot because in his early life he was part of a military campaign to conquer the land then known as Gaul (nowadays it’s known as France). This was when he met Julius Caesar, and we think is safe to assume that his relationship (not a romantic one, you people giving me weird looks) with Caesar is a big part of his role in the play.

His heart.

For his heart we added drawings of his five wives, because of he didn’t love them something was up, as well as an ancient weighing system (something tell me it’s called a libra but I looked up the definition and it said it isn’t) because of his love of balance and justice.

His head.

For his brain we added a skull and crossbones because of his death by suicide, which he certainly had on-the-mind when he was defeated by Augustus. For his eyes we added laurel wreaths because that was a symbol of power and worn by Caesar, and as we know Mark was a good, um, friend? Ally? Something of that nature to the Caesar of his age (Julius) and for his mouth we added a megaphone because as a politician he did a lot of public speaking. We made the megaphone in the colours of the Greek flag because he spent time there before his militaristic campaign against the Gauls and after Julius Caesar’s death.

In conclusion this project taught my about body biographies, a great way of comprehending knowledge which I kind of like. But if I did it again I would have added Cleopatra somewhere and not been sick on presentation day.

Growth Mindset

Since the start of the year we in Navig8 have been doing a project on growth mindset. I think this important for everyone to understand so I’ll tell you guys all about it.

The basic idea is that there are two ways people look at challenges and setbacks. Some people think that you are born with natural ability and there is no point in trying to improve. This is called fixed mindset. Others think that how well you do is determined by how much effort you put in and that with effort you can improve. This is called growth mindset. If you are interested in learning more about growth mindset there is a book by Carol Dweck which pioneered growth mindset.

But as with every school assignment just telling us about it isn’t good enough. Throughout the year we have done several assignments on this topic, most of which involved reflecting on our personal growth and fixed mindset so that we could know what we could do differently. We also watched a lot of videos while taking sketch notes. Unfortunately I don’t have an iPad Pro and thus no Apple Pencil, so my notes were an indecipherable mess.

An example of my sketch notes.

The last project we did was called Growth Mindset Long Term Goal Selfie (just rolls of the tongue doesn’t it?). For this project we had to make a long-term goal and edit it onto a selfie using an app such as Canva or Photoshop.

My Growth Mindset Long Term Goal Selfie.

For my goal the basic idea is that I want to be more inspired and prepared when a big project comes around by doing self-led projects in my spare time. The picture was an old one my parents sent me because I am physically incapable of taking serious selfies (just saying the word plunges me into a state of suicidal despondency) so we looked at some pictures they had of me and they emailed the winner to my iPad.

The main thing this project taught me is what it’s like to make a serious edit in Canva (most of my work that comes from there looks like this):

A typical edit in Canva.

As well as just how much I don’t want to take selfies (ugh, that word again…)

Next time though I would try to understand what my goal is more thoroughly, because I needed some help to get the phrasing to “print” level.

Mini exhibition

Last December all of the Performance Learning Program held a mini exhibition, where we showcased a project we spent the last month making. Every grade had a different theme, and ours was the environment. For my project I tried to find out what the worlds most successful aquatic invasive species is. I spent several days researching and I concluded that the most populous aquatic invasive species is the zebra mussel.

For my presentation I decided to do several things: a hands-on demonstration of how zebra mussels slip into ship’s ballast tanks and are transported across the globe, a map showing where the zebra mussel is native to, where it was introduced to and where the threat of introduction is highest, a sort of Q and A flowchart-thingy and a slideshow of pictures of zebra mussels on my iPad. It took a while to decide what to do to represent my information, but I was brainstorming with my dad and he misunderstood my idea about making an accurate model of a ballast tank and using it to show how zebra mussels get inducted, he though I would do both separately and use something like what I actually ended up using instead. On presentation day though, this caused a problem because Kiefer, who was in my group and presenting next to me, had done a similar thing about ballast tanks, so we had to present our projects in a way that highlighted their differences.

It all worked out well. We were assigned shifts to greet people at the door and to present the Minecraft project we did in scimathics (by the way me and my partner Robin agree our project was a wreck) but for both of my shifts the teachers told me to go and look at what the other grades were doing (the grade 9s did a similar type of exhibition but Harry Potter themed and the grade 11s did a tour-styled exhibition on the history and identity of Canada) and that they would cover for me while I did so.

In retrospect I would have consulted with my group to see what they’re doing beforehand so that I don’t end up doing the same thing. I would also plan out the space on the table because our projects took up pretty much all the space on the table.

My Year In Review

So once again Google published their year in search, where they show the sort of things people looked up this year, or used a series of videos that give hope to viewers and manipulating the audience into associating feelings like hope and love with their company, either one works. It’s basically an ad for Google, but it has some good content if you’re in a deep funk about the world. It had some things I recognized in the video, such as the Paris Attack, and the young Syrian boy  who was pulled from the rubble at Aleppo, but there were a few things I didn’t recognize, such as this.

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I heard about the Paris attacks but I seemed to have missed the Brussels bombings. They were a series of three suicide bombings, two in the Brussels airport and one in the Maalbeek metro station. I didn’t hear about it because I get most of my news from the news tab on my iPad’s home screen, which I didn’t have on March 22, when the bombings took place.

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There wasn’t anything in the video that particularly shocked me (the most shocking things I have seen before) but there were a few things that surprised me in a different way. One was the appearance of Ellen DeGeneres because I’ve heard of her several times but never really understood what she was all about. I’ve only ever seen one clip of her show a while back when she made a joke about how Adele is calling her, which isn’t very original (maybe it was back then?) which further led to my confusion.

Another thing that left me with the same feeling was the guy in the video saying “love is love is love is…” I lost track. This baffled me because it looks like he’s in some kind of court defending someone and happens to get his words jumbled up, but I doubt that would be a suitable way to defend anyone who winds up in court… I really have no idea what’s going on in the world do I.

If I made a year in review? Well think about it. The video for the whole world lasts two minutes. By that logic my year in review should be 0.000000017142857 seconds long. Maybe I’d include the mini exhibition, because it’s the most interesting thing I did this year and it would be easiest to get a video of.

What I’ve done so far in our advertising project.

Since the beginning of the year me and the rest of navig8 have been doing a project on advertising. We started by learning the ways of the trade, such as the techniques and appeals advertisers use and colour appeals professionals use. After many weeks we were ready to start our own print adds. We were to do three: a business ad that would advertise a business, a tourism ad that would advertise a place to visit and an advocacy ad that would advertise earthquake awareness.

We’re still working on them now but we have made three drafts of each. After each draft was completed we received feedback from fellow students and applied the feedback to our next draft. Here are the drafts that I have done.

Tourism ads:

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Draft One

This is my first draft. This is an ad for a park, but you can’t really tell because the picture is just a quick sketch I drew to remind me where to take the picture from when it stops raining. The main thing I wanted to capture was the words. I wanted to advertise Wagg creek park as a place worth visiting but more for people who want something most other tourist destinations lack: peace and quiet. The feedback I received was to make “quiet” lowercase.

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Draft Two

For the second draft I finally got a picture, albiet one taken in poor weather. I also changed the font for quiet so that it fit the word better, as well as make it lowercase, not that you can tell with the font. Some feedback I received was that the picture doesn’t really work to sell the location (ironically I had to take it from there because right behind me were three teenagers who I wouldn’t say were revealing in the peace and quiet) and that the address was hard to read.

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Draft Three

For my third draft I got a new picture, this time not in the rain but at night, but I did get a person (my mom) on a bench in it. I also made the address bigger. This is my latest draft but it’s still far from finished, what with the darkness of the picture and the fact that my mom and the bench are blocked by the text and that it seems as though the focus is on the wooden planks instead of the pond. I will fix this soon.

Business ads:

design
Draft One

For my business I’m advertising I choose Bouton Rouge Designs, my moms jewelry shop. She sent me two images I could use for my ad, the one you see (two people with “best friends” rings holding hands) and another one, and a picture of her logo but since I was making my ad in Canva the other picture and the logo were either not in the photos section or hidden somewhere they shouldn’t be, so I had to use this picture and just type the brand name, which led on to lots of “it doesn’t really scream jewelry” like feedback.

Draft Two
Draft two

For my second ad I made the picture black and white because my mom thought it should be (also just now I realized the original picture she sent me was black and white but magically had colours when I used it. Weird.) and finally got the logo up there. The hardest part about making this was that when I added the logo the dark parts of one of the fingers was blocking out the dark parts of the logo, so to fix it I (cool Canva tip!) made the background white and made the picture a little transparent. Some feedback I got was that some of the text was two small, that “stay close” doesn’t make a lot of sense and that I should move “stay close” somewhere else.

Draft Three
Draft Three

I didn’t really agree with most of the feedback I received but decided I should follow it anyways, because since these are drafts I don’t necessarily have to do it that way for the final print ad. What I did was change “stay close” to “never be apart” and move it to the bottom, because that was the only place it wouldn’t block one of the rings. I also added a period to the end. My mom told me it was a bad idea before but I thought it worked here, especially since it was horizontally alligned with something else. The font I used for “never be apart” isn’t supposed to be like that, something must have messed up, probably I exited the draft before it saved. I recieved some feedback on this as well: “wait, those are two hands?” Back to the drawing board I guess.

Advocacy ad:

(No picture)

Draft One

Right of the start this was my favourite ad I’ve done. I was thinking about what I was going to do for the ad around the time I was thinking about airplanes and how many preflight checks they have to have, and it all went from there. I don’t have a picture because my second draft was an edited version of my first draft. It pretty much looked like my second draft that you can see down there but it had more vague numbers (such as over 2000 instead of 2468 from 2000-2015) and it said “be prepared” on the bottom. I don’t recall any feedback but I do remember thinking the facts are too vague and it doesn’t state which disaster to prepare for clear enough.

Draft Two
Draft Two

For my second draft I changed the text a bit on the bottom half. I had some problems with uploading it to Showbie (where we hand in our work) because since it was an edit of draft one I had saved it as an image (but apparently not) and a PDF and didn’t know how to safe the new version, so I took a screenshot and put it in a new design, whcpich is why the graphics are bad and there’s some white space on the edges. Some feedback I received was to change the font and to change the colouring on the top left to be darker. We were also shown how to find images you could legally use, which meant I had to find new pictures.

Draft Three
Draft Three

For my third draft I got new pictures. I didn’t change the text because the pictures were darker so white was ok, and if you think it’s hard to read on the right picture it isn’t when it’s bigger. Some feedback I got was that the font should still be different, that the text is hard to read in some places and that the text on the bottom should be red.

Coding

So for the past week or two me and the rest of Navig8 have been working on coding in Swift. We’re not finished yet and I don’t know how much more we will do, but we’ve definitely done some cool stuff already.

Naturally, when learning how to code the first thing you must learn is how to do the hustle. For about a week Van McCoy’s big hit would play on the speaker system randomly during any humanities class and when it did we were bound by honour to stop what we were doing and do the hustle. Trust me, this has something to do with coding.

Then we did some activities to help us think like a computer: in text (or in this case speech) only. Then we were introduced to Swift Playgrounds, an app that teaches you to code in the coding language Swift. We would do a few levels of the app and then right a reflection on it. So far we have done two reflections.

After many days working through the course “Learn To Code 1” in Swift Playgrounds we were told why we did the hustling thing as part of our introduction to functions. The thing is to think of it as a function, you would do the dance, then turn left and repeat, much like you could in Swift Playgrounds. We were told this while we had several visitors from Apple, who wanted to know how Swift Playgrounds was going, the principle of Seycove and a newspaper photographer (check the papers!). After that we did some more of Learn To Code 1. The sections I have completed in Playgrounds as of today include Commands (where it teaches simple commands like moveForward() and turnLeft()), Functions (where it teaches you how to turn a sequence of commands into a single function you can call upon instead of re-coding the whole thing) and For Loops (where it teaches you how to repeat a sequence of commands as many times as you want) and am currently working on conditional code (where it teaches you how to code when you don’t know specifically what to code for).

An example of commands:

An example of functions:

An example of loops:

So that’s what we did, and that’s all good and well but if your reading this from my blog particularly you probably care more about what I think about it.

I enjoyed the hustle, it was fun to stop working and start doing a wacky dance from the seventies. The activities were cool as well, but here were a few difficulties, for example for one activity we were supposed to take a selfie video explaining how to get from the door of a room to a small object you hid and I didn’t finish the video and had to write the instructions down.

The coding in Swift Playgrounds has been fun, I found the first part kind of easy because late last year I took a course on how to code in… c++, maybe? I forgot, but anyways I already knew the basics, But as it progressed it got more difficult and I enjoyed the challenges that faced me with things like loops and if statements, which I think I could have done in that course I took last year but I still enjoyed learning it again (and to clear this up the commands which I learned to use in whatever code I learned last year were written differently but still did the same things). I also like the visuals, I like how everything is on a floating island that almost always has a waterfall flowing off of it, I like the wacky characters you can use, I like the models for the gems and switches and such, and I like the overall graphics quality and style, but my favourite part is probably the tunnels of water that you can see going below the ground because I dunno. I like running water.

The visit from the various people from Apple and whatnot was cool as well. I remember the most interesting part being when they asked for things we thought they could change about Swift Playgrounds and just then my app crashed. Rest assured they are working on fixing that.

Basically So far I have been having a lot of fun with this project and can’t wait to do more.

The Rain

As fall falls on North Vancouver, it rains. A lot. In fact it has been raining for pretty much 5 days straight. And I’ve been loving it.

Its not that rain stops me from going outside, there’s just less pressure to do so. I can stay inside, read a book, or, more likely, play a video game, and no one but me feels responsible to stop me. I like to sit right by a window and marvel at the fact that nature wants me cold and wet and yet here I am, perfectly fine.

Of course once I’m done with this there are plenty of things to do in the rain. I can walk anywhere I would normally go but some places are more fun in the rain. Like this fish ladder in a park near my house. In the rain the water often overflows over the steps. Then you can trace the water that feeds it to its source and see it gooshing (there’s no better word) out of the pipe. Pretty much any river or stream is better in the rain. Forests are fun in the rain because the trees manipulate the rainfall. The only place I can picture would be worse in the rain is a muddy field. Biking and scootering and such also isn’t as fun, to be fair.

So I’m delighted at the current rainfall, yet still hope it’ll snow…

Camera Angles

It’s the start of a new school year and I’m kicking off with a project I did with my fellow navig8 students on camera angles.

Strangely for a PLP project it started with a worksheet. It started out in life as part of a tree and after some processing it wound up in my classroom covered in titles, text, blanks spaces and various black and what images taken from movies you’d think you should remember the names of because some of them had Liam Neeson in them.

But as with all worksheets it doesn’t really matter how it was made or even what’s on it. What matters is what you do with it, and what we did with it was this: Read the title of the picture. Look at the picture. Fill in the two spaces next to the picture: what do you see in this shot? and Why would a director use this shot? And repeat until you have filled in the blanks for all six angles: The establishing shot for establishing the setting, the wide shot for giving a better impression of size, the high-angle shot for showing more action, the low-angle shot for giving an impression of power, the medium shot for providing a closer view on several characters and the close-up shot for providing a detailed view of a characters facial expressions. then fill in the chart on the final page which asks you to name each angle and write the impact it has on the audience, for example the establishing shot helps them piece together different views of the setting from different scenes.

Now that the paperwork was out of the way it was time for a more hands-on approach, so we headed outside for some photography. We were split into two groups, one to play a random game and the other to take pictures of the game in progress. The goal for group two was to get one shot of each of the six angles discussed on the worksheet and a few videos. After a period of time I don’t remember the length of the groups switched places so the group taking photos was now playing a (different) game and the group playing a game took pictures of the aforementioned new game.

Skipping a few days we returned to our photographic adventure with an introduction to the app comic life 3 (here’s the link to it on the App Store: Comic Life 3)After we had all got our bearings we were told to use the app to make a one-page comic to showcase our pictures we had taken several days ago, one of each of the six different angles we learned about, which was important because next class we set up our personal blogs and were told our comics would be the subject of our first post, so, without further ado, I present My Comic.