Hi! It’s time for the last PLP Maker 8 blog post. Because of the Corona Virus we were unable to go into the school to have our 2020 spring exhibition but our teachers made it possible for us to still do it. We did an online exhibition and everyone was able to do it from their homes. This time our projects were about the 17 Global Goals for Sustainable Development. Let’s get into the post!

My Individual Project!

For our project we got to pick whichever goal we wanted. I chose goal number 7 affordable and clean energy. During quarantine everyone is wanting to talk to their friends while staying at home. The only problem is the power we have now is really bad for the environment. Solar powered walkie talkies were invented a while ago but have never been a very big thing. They were also quite expensive to begin with because they charge using solar panels. Solar panels are more expensive as they are also not very common. Overtime the cost in solar panels has been decreasing and has predicted to continue dropping in cost steadily over the next few years. They are currently only $70 to $90 for a set including the solar panel charger and with the cost dropping they should be around $60 to $70 in a few years. This would be one step in helping our climate. For my individual project I did a lot of research on solar powered walkie talkies. I wanted to know why they were so expensive and when/how they could become more affordable.

Group Project!

For the exhibition we were all put into groups with grade 9s and 10s based on what goal we chose. I was in the Climate and Energy group with people who chose goals 7, 13 and 15. We were to build a 10 minute story and script to perform at the exhibition. We decided to do a chose your own path story and I was the narrator. We had a few paths but all of them had our own projects Incorporated into them. The audience got to decide by writing in the chat and the options they were given were the character, the forest or city and who they wanted to talk to first. We had multiple practices leading up to he exhibition and in the end I felt we did very well.

Explain Everything!

Just like for the Star Wars winter exhibition we made a Launch journal for the spring exhibition. This is where all my individual work was documented and posted to my YouTube. I go through every step of the LAUNCH process. LAUNCH Look, listen and learn, Ask tons of questions, Understand the problem or process, Navigate ideas, Create a prototype and Highlight and fix. Enjoy the video!

Curricular Competencies!

Research and Understand: How might I research and understand a problem, process, or challenge using different perspectives?

For this my example is my prototype. The majority of my project was researching. I needed to find multiple good sights to make sure that my information was 100% correct. This took a lot of time as it was quite hard to find multiple sights with the information I needed.

Take Creative Risks: How might I use technology to create in new ways?

My example for this one is my solar walkie talkies. I use a lot of power a day especially while doing this project i used my iPad for all the research. I wanted to find a new way to communicate while using clean energy. I had a few ideas for the technology i wanted to do but decided the walkie talkies would be the best.

Revise: How might I see this as a First Attempt In Learning and revise?

I have failed so much in this project it was hard. I struggled to find a lot of information for my project. A really good example I have for this competency is the group script. We changed our script so many times revising it and making it better. We even were revising it on the day of the exhibition. We needed it to be as close to ten minutes as possible which was really hard to do as we kept going overtime.

Overall this project has been a blast and so has grade 8. I’m going to miss it a lot but I’m really looking forward to grade 9.