Month: May 2018

#BCTechSummit, Eh

ethand on

Not too long ago my class and I went on a one day field trip to the BC Tech Summit. At first I had no clue to what it acutally was, but the more I learned about it the more intrigued I became. The BC Tech Summit, is almost like an exhibition where a few thousand people go to one spot in downtown Vancouver, and look at new forms of technology and how it is changing our world. Another cool part about is that entrepreneurs, and people like motivational speakers from generally BC, come to the Summit and talk about there expierences in life or more specifically with technology.

Of course, we were given assignments while we were there. One of the assignments was to listen and take notes on two of the speakers, after you were done taking the notes you would write about them and about there company. I chose to talk about David Katz, as I thought that his company was rather interesting.  This is what I wrote about him:

David Katz and Plastic Bank

David Katz is the Founder and CEO of Plastic Bank. When he was just starting his company he made an appearance on Dragons Den in one episode. In that episode none of the Dragons gave him an offer as they thought that his company was a scam as it is not a not for profit company and it is made so that he is able to pocket a lot fo the money his company makes. David has spoken at many events, as he is said to deliver a “genuine paradigm shift that inspires his audience to see opportunity, where others see problems”. Now onto what his company actually does. HIs company makes it so that anybody can find plastic on the side of the street or wherever you might find it, and take it to a centre where you can exchange it for money or anything that is use to you look cooking fuel etc. It is supposed to empower recycling ecosystems around eh world and stop plastic from getting into and polluting our oceans, and at the same time it is supposed to help people living in poverty by making it easier to create a better future for themselves. “The Plastic Bank creates social and environmental impact in areas with high levels of poverty and plastic pollution by turning plastic waste into a currency”. Another problem with plastic bank is that he is not really getting rid of plastic in this world as he is just buying plastic off of one person and selling it to other company’s. So he essentially he is just moving the plastic from one place to another. After learning about David Katz and Plastic Bank, I think that he has a great idea, but I think he went the wrong way with it, and if he changed it in some way it could possibly help the world immensely.

Quotes

The other person I decided to talk about was Brent Bushnell who is an entrepreneur for Two Bit Circus. This is what I had to say about him:

Brent Bushnell and Two Bit Cirucs

Brent Bushnell is the Co-Founder fo a company called Two Bit Circus. Two Bit Circus’ main focus is based on youth innovation. The company hosts “Circuses” for youth to come and showcase their work. That is not all that Two Bit Circus does, at these showcase events they also show off some of their own innovations. Bushnell’s company has created a fun way for youth to get creative and try something new, and gain skills that will help them later on in life. Brents reason for Co-creating this company is fully based off of following his passion. I think that following your passion is a great motivation to create amazing work. That is exactly what Brent and Two Bit Circus.

One of the other tasks we had was to look at the options for university’s while we were there. A few university’s showed up to the tech summit, including BCIT, UBC, and UVIC. I mainly talked to the person who was advertising for UVIC. The reason I chose to focus on them was the fact I didn’t know much about UVIC and to be completely honest I hadn’t put any of those university’s on my list. I wanted to hear what they had to say about UVIC. I still dont think I am going to go to any of those universitys as I have thought carefully about what universitys I want to go to. For the past couple of years I have thought about what Universitys I want to go to, currently I would prefer to go to Stanford, even though it is probably to expensive, and the acceptance rate is very low. My next option is McGill. The reason I chose it is, from my perspective it is a very good school, and it seems attainable for me. My third choice is University of Alberta. I chose that based off of the fact it has a fairly good engineering program that I am interested in. My fourth choice is UBCO, I chose that because I believe I can get into it without having to many issues, and it still needed to be decent distance from home as my parents want me to leave the general area of Vancouver.

The last assignment that we had to do while we were there was, to create yet another podcast. We had to interview a mentor who was at the summit to talk to youth about his company. I am not going to talk much about the person as I have a podcast that can explain everything. The person I interviewed was Dave Donaldson from Teck, which is a mining company.

Going to the Tech Summit was truly and eye opening expierence as it showed how quickly technology is effecting th world. It was given to me in many different examples such as entrepreneurs, and people in industry’s such as mining.

WWII, Eh

ethand on

This past unit in humanities has been centred around The Second World War. It was definitely one fo the more interesting units that I have ever done, as there was so much information packed into such small period of time. We were told that our end product was going to be a website. The website would be about the different perspectives of WWII, the persepectives would come from the view of each country. There was several different options to do your reasearch in a group on country’s who played major roles in the war but, if you wanted to you could go on your own and do reasearch on a country that wasnt on the list. I requested to do my reasearch on Canada, I now regret that decision as I already knew quite a bit about Canadas involvement in the war and I think it would have been a better decision to learn about another country.

Besides making the website, we learned about the war in general and all fo the battles. One of the most interesting battles that we focused on was Dunkirk. In the evacutation of Dunkirk, the German Forces had backed the French up against the English Channel. The French were completley surrounded with nowhere to go. The british decided to do an evacuation by sea. The rounded up basically every boat that could go through the English Channel. There were hundreds of boats from pleasure crafts to ferrrys and even fishing boats. Two days after the evacuation started the Luftwaffe bombed the port of Dunkirk, whihc made the evacuation much more difficult. On June 4th, 1940 the evacuation was completed after saving 340,000 people, which was much more than they thought they could ever achieve. ALthough the evacuation was succesful, France surrendered to Germany on the 22nd of June.

Another thing we did was do a book review on one of three books we had to choose form that involved World War 2. I made a blog post on that not too long ago here it is.

Unbroken Book Reveiw, Eh

One of the more intersting portions of this unit was the fact that our class got to interview a German War Veteran. It was so cool to just meet one in general but getting to talk to him about his expierence was completley unreal. The person we interviewed was is Helmut Lemke, as I said he is a War Veteran that fought for Germany, he fought on the eastern front against the USSR. Helmut is also involved with this program called the Historica Memory Project. It was definitely one of the coolest things I have ever done, after we interviewed him we each took a piece of the recording we took of him and made a small podcast out of it.

One of the more boring parts of this unit was learning how to cite videos, websites, and books. It was mandatory as we needed to do it properly on our website. Which now brings me to how we created our website. We used Weebly to make the website as our teacher thought that was the best way to do it as she had created websites previously with Weebly. We later found out that Weebly is super glitchy to use on an iPad, so ended up doing basically on our iPads and then sending it to a computer where we put the info into the website. My group and I evenly split up the work of the website where each one of us would do two pages or so, as there were three of us and we needed to do somewhere around six pages. Instead of me explaining what we did for each individual page I will just show you what we did.

Perspectives of WWII

This unit was one of my favourites and I really enjoyed doing the research on my country, as I found some very interesting information that I would not have found if I didn’t do this unit. I don’t know if I would change anything except maybe explore different website builders for the iPad as Weebly was not ideal. As I said before this was one of the most interesting and engaging units I have ever done. I feel that I have learned a lot from this unit not just in what happened but, I feel that I view the world a bit differently. One of the main things that has changed my worldview was Helmut Lemke, and I quote “No one wins a war”. That single phrase completley changed how I thought about war, because he was completley right, no one does win a war, every country involved lost something. WWII caused every country that fought in it to lose lives, either civilians or soldiers. That was the biggest thing that I took away from this unit.

Job Shadow, Eh

ethand on

Back at the beginning of our planning unit, our teacher told us that we were going to have to do a job shadow. We ended up getting the specifics of what we had to do not too much later, after that class I almost immediately decided on who I was going to job shadow. The person who I decided was my best candidate happened to be a family friend that I have known for many years, his name is Brian Webster. My parents didn’t know much about what he did, they just claimed he is a “mad scientist”. What Brian actually does is work in nuclear medicine industry, creating treatments for cancer.

The reason why I chose to shadow Brian is that I am very interested in chemistry currently, and I would like to do something similar to what Brian does or become a Chemical Engineer. Before I went to his warehouse I had no clue what nuclear medicine was, but I figured out that chemotherapy is actually a form of nuclear medicine. After I found out what he actually does for a living I was super intrigued.

On the day of my job shadow I went to work with Brian in the morning and we went to a warehouse, and I was expecting to see inside a large chemistry lab, but instead I saw two large machines that were constantly running. These machines are not machines that you can just buy on the internet, you have to find parts for them then put them together yourself. I was constantly checking out what was going in each part of his warehouse. He currently has two employees to help him take care of what is going on, as there a lot of things you need to do to get the job done. One of the main things you need to do is make sure the machines are working in tip-top shape, so if something breaks somebody has to find a way to solve that problem. The solve those problems by often having to design and manufacture custom parts.

Before Brian created his own company he worked for a company called Nordion, he was a full time chemistry production technician. He essentially worked with radioactive materials, wrote his own procedures, they then later formalized the procedures. Once he made his own company, he started mainly doing physics. What he does now is take certain elements and basically purify them to a certain percentage. The machines do most of the work but he has to do some by hand.

Brian spends most of his time at work at a computer console using spreadsheets to figure out the consistency of the machine, planning for the next shipment, emails, and tuning machines throughout the day.

The job shadow that I did that day, was an experience I will never forget as it was truly eye opening, and it showed me something that I didn’t even know existed until now. It amazed me how much chemistry and physics is used in all of our lives. I am very thankful that Brian gave me that opportunity to see what he does in his everyday life.