It’s that time of year again, where all the lights go up and Christmas songs are played on every radio station. That’s right it is the 2018 PLP winter exhibition! Now I know you were probably thinking I was going to say Christmas, however this a school blog so therefore I will be writing about schoolwork.

This year our big project was not a blue sky project, it was a group project where we made a story using the science of chemical bonding. If your confused I get it, read my science blog post if you want to briefly understand what that is. My group included Aedan, Amelia, Anika, and Nik. However originally we only started in groups of 2 or 3. In that phase I was only with Amelia and Anika.

The first thing we did for this project was learn the science. In our partnerships or trios we did plenty of worksheets learning about covalent and ionic bonds. As well as getting to know the periodic table. While all this was happening in our science classes, our humanities classes were spent reading short stories and analyzing them. We learned how to properly anazlye a story and how to identify and create a theme.

With all of our knowledge of stories and science it was time to combine the two. We started writing a short story that included chemical bonding. Our story starred Old Lady Sulfur on her mission to find a new pet. Scientifically speaking, she was looking for another atom to complete her valence shell, creating a bond. So she went to many different places to find a pet until she found the right one. Below is our animation of the story.

The next step in this project was taking our smaller groups and merging them together. Our trio was paired with Aedan and Nik. I was very happy about that because I was a big fan of their original story. Their story centred around a dating app that someone used to find their true love. I instantly knew that in our combined story Old Lady Sulfur definitely needed to be using the dating app. So we spent many classes coming up with ideas and story boarding. I remember one day we all had to put our story board on the whiteboard and someone from another group had to read it. If they could understand what was happening it was pretty good. It was a very long day but every group benefited largely from it. After that all of our stories were much better.

In a short version our story went like this. Old Lady Sulfur’s dog radium passed away of natural causes and she was lonely again. So she downloaded the dating app bond and was sucked inside of the app. Inside she met someone named Strontium who claimed to have been in there for a long time. The two fall in love and get engaged, but one day when Strontium is out looking for a way to escape Old Lady Sulfur goes into his office. In there she sees evidence that Strontium created the app and is just using it to find someone that completes his valence shell. Outraged she confronts him and he says that he regrets it and just wants to live with her in the real world but there is no way out. She forces him to delete the app from the App Store. Even though the app was his life’s work he got rid of it for Old Lady Sulfur. The two of them than started making this phone world a homey community. Every person that was sucked inside got a home and they made they’re own little town inside.

With all of the stories done we started planning for exhibition night. The task was to transform a room into an immersive experience that was a piece of our story. Inside of the room there had to be clues about the other parts of the story. As well as some sort of game or experience for the people to do inside.

The PLP room before the night

Our group got the staff room and slowly but surely made all of our plans and got all the supplies to do it. The idea was so you enter through a giant phone as if your stepping into the app. Inside Strontium, played by Amelia, talks to you. You can then go into Strontium’s office to figure out his secrets. You could play element pool and learn some new chemical bonds, or you could chat to Old Lady Sulfur in her corner. Or lastly you could just have some nice elegant food and sit at tables getting to know people.

The exhibition went very well and everyone seemed to love the room. My main contributions to the exhibition project was making the phone, making the food, and changing our story after critiques. This project taught me a lot. Obviously I learned about chemical bonding and how to analyze a story. I also feel like my writing skills improved a lot. After doing a lot of writing in the short story, I started to write more narratively and much neater. I was also very proud of myself for animating the video and making the giant iPhone. Overall I really liked this project. The main thing I would change if I were to do it again would be having access to the room earlier. If we had acces to the room for a week or something we could’ve done a lot more to really make it much more immersive. Otherwise I really liked it and my group were amazing. I’m very happy with what we accomplished. Here some photos after we transformed the room.