Hey everyone,

I just wrote about our first project in Sci-Matics so know it’s time to talk about our first project in humanities, “People And The Environment”. For this project, we had to pick an issue with the environment and write to someone in the government. I chose to write to Johnathan Wilkinson about water pollution and illegal dumping. Something different about this project was instead of having 5 or 6 milestones we only had 3 with a few stepping stones along the way.

This project started with a simple topic pitch, pretty simple. As I mentioned in the sci-matics blog post, I was sick for the first few days so my topic pitch wasn’t that good to start with, it wasn’t that specific, it was just “water pollution”. I got some help from the teachers, did some research and boom, I had my topic, “Illegal Dumping In BC Waters”.

Then we moved on to the Letter Plan Conference. For this we had to have research on our topic, who we were writing to, and any other questions we had. Going into the conferences I wasn’t sure on who to write to but coming out of the conference I had decided to write to Johnathan Wilkinson.

We then moved on to reading and writing activities on CommonLit. For this we would read a story that relates to our project (People And The Environment) then answer questions about the story. I am not the best writer out there but I do feel as the CommonLit activities went on my writing improved. We also did a vocabulary quiz on CommonLit which was pretty easy as I was able to get 100%. The very last thing we did with CommonLit was this thing called CommonLit Connections. For CommonLit Connections we had to relate one of the stories to our letter. I connected the story about a guy named Lee Sherman who’s company was asking him to dumb all of their trash into to local bayou, the obvious connection with my letter is that I wrote about illegal dumping.

And after all of this, we finally got to finish our letters and have them mailed. For mailing the letter we didn’t just give them to our teacher to take to the post office, we actually walked down to Deep Cove village and mailed them ourselves. Even though it was raining I thought it was really cool that we got to mail them ourselves, and it does beat sitting in a classroom all day!

Photo of me and some friends mailing our letters:

Well, that just about wraps up my blog post for this project! Hope you enjoyed!

Hey everyone, I have returned under a new blog name (The Surrey Knights super incredible great success blog site. Ru) and in a new grade (9) and I am going to talk about the first project I have completed in the 9th grade! This project was a lot like our first project in sci-matics 8, which is making a game. Obviously this time around, there is more complex math. We had to make our game revolving around exponent laws.

Curricular Competencies:

Communicating and Representing

Our game was based of poker but with exponent laws. Every card had an exponent law and a different picture of a dog for each exponent law. How the game works is everyone gets 5 cards and the chips are given out evenly amongst all the players. The dealer starts off the game by betting any amount they want. Players can look at their cards and the rankings of the laws. The rankings of the exponent laws best to worst are: Division Law, Distributive Property Law, Exponent to Exponent Law, Coefficient Law, and Multiplication Law. Once everyone has bet, the players reveal their cards, who ever has the best hand wins the round. The player with the most amount of points at the end of the game wins. I was sick for the first few days of class so I fell behind and found the math super difficult to understand. So while my group was already starting on the game, I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I eventually got caught up and was still able to contribute in card design and cutting out the game chips/cards.
Example of card:

Reasoning and Analyzing

We had instructions on how you win rounds and how our chip based point system works. Each chip had either a 5, 10, 15, or 20 on it to show how many points each chip is worth. If you were playing the game in Morristown, New Jersey, then everyone realized they were in Morristown, NJ and wanted to leave, the winner of the game would be decided by whoever has the most points.

Applying and Innovating
As I mentioned before, I missed the first few days of school so I fell behind a little behind. But as I caught up this ended up being a very fun project. Designing the cards and testing our game was super fun. The biggest thing I learned from this project would be to try to stay on top of your work if you are sick!

Alright! That’s about it for now! Thanks for reading!