This was a project which taught me a lot, was lots of fun, and I will definitely remember.

Throughout the project we made a photo essay describing how a community changed and accustomed to the physical distancing that will most likely be in effect until around June 1st. I used my bike to get around to take some shorts of the changes. I mostly biked to places, took some pictures, played around, and biked back. The system worked well and sometimes I did have to walk but that was when I hiked to get somewhere. I got quite a few good pictures and in the end I got enough to make the photo essay which I hope you enjoy.

(Click on the photos to see where they’re from, the ones without links are from Deep Cove).
The photo essay

I hope you enjoyed it and that I managed to tell a story through the pictures and that little bit of text.

The climbing community that I’ve made my photo essay about is the North Shore climbing community, mostly the Hive Community. I made it about the North Shore Hive community because that’s where I and more or less all of the climbers from Cap University, along with quite a few from Lonsdale climb. I also chose The Hive because their logo is “Your climbing community” which ties in with project quite well.

Now onto the driving question.

How can we, as photojournalists, tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing?
I think that because in photojournalism you’re not actually touching the person being photographed, it’s ok to take pictures of people. So you can tell a story by photographing a process that people are going through. You can also take pictures of the places affected by (in this case the lockdown) an event and how it’s unusual.

Overall this was a project that I thoroughly enjoyed and would most likely do on my spare time over a longer period. I think that we learned a lot about the pandemic itself and about the community we were studying. As you had seen, almost all of my pictures didn’t have anyone in them and when they did the person in them was me. So you can even tell just by looking at the photos that something is off. It was a good project which I would like to do a variation of in the future.

This project was centered around making a comic about an explorer, the explorers significance, and a virus or disease the explorer brought with them which resulted in infecting and most likely killing some natives. For my comic I decided to pick the explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado who’s expedition was land based. He was exploring the Southern USA.

At the start of the project we made mind maps of what we knew and the questions we had. My mind maps looked like this.

After we made the mind map we started working on some different assignments which were focused on us learning about the explorers and the diseases. They were the kind of work where you read, listen, and learn so I won’t show those to you.

After we did the assignments we started working on the actual project which was the comic. We started with the storyboard which is more or less a discount version of the comic with all of the defining points and just nothing to fill the gaps. It was a long process which took me a few hours to do but altogether not as hard as the comic itself.

The comic was the real hardship, mostly because of the drawing. The first picture of the comic is a good example of that. All it really is, is some tracings of a few things put together to make a portrait. I wanted it to look good and more or less spent the whole day drawing a person standing in a desert. It took me a while to get the time spent per drawing down to two hours and then even less. So because I spent so much time on the first ten drawings I would say that the average time spent per drawing was about two hours, maybe more.

Here is my comic:                                                                          (Click on the picture)

I hope you liked it, now onto the competencies and the driving questions.

First the driving questions, which were:

“What is the historical significance of your explorer?” and “How do cells and diseases/viruses interact?”

What is the historical significance of my explorer?

Some things of positive significance are that he and his expedition found a number of physical landmarks which are admired today.

Some negative aspects are that he disregarded the human rights of several members of his voyage and also killed a huge number of natives directly as he executed those who did not want to convert to Christianity and also indirectly, as one of the slaves on his expedition brought the influenza virus which natives were not immune to.

Now onto the second driving question

How do cells and diseases/viruses interact?

Viruses depend on the host cells that they infect to reproduce. Virus infects the host cell and uses it to multiply until the host cell dies. If the body survives the virus, it remembers it for the future. When the body gets attacked by the same virus another time, it can deploy antibodies to restrict virus from reproducing and eventually to kill it off.

Before Coronados expedition, the natives were never exposed to influenza virus before. Therefore their bodies did not produce any antibodies and the virus killed them. Those who survived were most likely immune.

Now that I’ve discussed the driving questions I’ll talk about the competencies. The competencies are, for Scimatics:

“Communicating: Communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems, using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies”

I think I did this well and I communicated my scientific findings, even if I didn’t say all of them I communicated the ideas in a way that the average reader could understand.

For Humanities: “Communicating: Communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems, using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies”

Throughout the comic I used proper grammar and wrote everything grammatically correct. I also displayed the historical factor of the comic well and made the explorers life and story well.

Connecting: “How do I understand my own and others’ personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?”

I can connect the text and stories to now and where I live and things around me. For example I connected the discovery and ever higher amounts of trade with the USA, with the USA eventually becoming the worlds most prominent and powerful country, only recently to be overtaken by China which hadn’t changed its ways for thousands of years and then being struck by a rapid industrialization and rapid economic growth.

Conclusion

I learned a lot and had lots of fun from this project. It taught me a lot about the Era of Exploration, and how cells and diseases interact. It was very much a fun project but something I had quite a lot of trouble with was the comic which took me way to long for what it was. I’m a slow and lousy drawer and it takes me too long to draw pictures. For next time I think that the option of writing a book or a short story should be also welcome because some of us are just better at it. That’s all, thanks for reading, and goodbye.

The DI* provincials have been canceled because of the coronavirus.            Fortunately for us we have technology.                                                                                       *DI = Destination Imagination

The DI Provincials

My DI group had more or less all of our stuff at school over spring break. Before spring break there was still school and the we’re building everything back just a bit better than it had been in the regionals, there was not much about the coronavirus. We were building our bridge and more or less all of our stuff was ready, all we had to do then was practice so that our show would be as good as could be. But we never got back to school after spring break. This meant that after spring break we only had the script to start out with and even the script needed to be changed a bit so that it would suit our needs. So the first thing that happened was that Kate changed the script. Because of some Zoom meetings we knew just about what the script would be and I got an old bridge which I made out of popsicle sticks and hot glue out for the meeting. Randy also made a small bridge out of Pokémon cards and later Keenan made a bridge out of paper. Continue reading →

This project was about how the move from elementary school to high school was like the Renaissance. First we learned a bit about the Renaissance. We learned about how the power which the church had was slowly given to rulers and also about the string of discoveries that led to new technology and people seizing to believe that life was just the path you take to either go to heaven or hell. After we learned about the Renaissance we started work on the assignment which was what the project would revolve around until its end, the song. For the song we had to replace the lyrics of REMs It’s the End of the World As We Know It with text about how high school was compared to how we expected it, expectation VS reality. If you’ve ever heard it you’d know that the lyrics of It’s the End of the World As We Know It you’d know that the singing is as so fast it’s like rap, so I really struggled with it.

The main part of this project was the song. I was alright at making the lyrics to the song but wasn’t that good at singing it with its fast beat. So I got past the fast beat by singing it at 75% speed. That was good until i found out it has to be fast. So I tried to record it while singing as fast as the song but I can’t sing that fast and my voice just sounds like gibberish along with the fact that my voice was flat. I had made the lyrics before I recorded so my lyrics weren’t on beat. To get around that I changed the lyrics so that they would fit the song. It was very good and I could sing it at 75% speed. The problem with it then when it needed to be faster was that I couldn’t sing the lyrics as fast as demanded. So then after all the struggle I decided that I’d just re-record my singing until it was good. In the end I think that I re-recorded about 30 times before I just said that I will never have my recording be good enough. I also made some changes to the lyrics and added some other parts to my lyrics throughout the recording to make it easier to sing. That was the main factor that made me less able to sing the song towards the end.

Although I didn’t get the song in right away I did well on all the other parts, and as a whole the project was fun. I think that next time instead of making the song be this really fast, and hard to sing and almost rap song we should pick the song ourselves. I struggled with singing the song very much and I think that making the song something different and slower like maybe an Abba song which is easier to sing and with which you can actually sing instead of saying words as fast as possible would make the project way more enjoyable and fun. Thanks for reading, goodbye.

For this project we had to choose a building or object and then design it in a CAD program. We had to then figure out the surface area to volume ratio of that object. It would make sense to do this to something where the volume to surface area ratio mattered like a car or a pool and so I decided to make it a bridge. I chose to make it a bridge because with bridges you want to use the least materials for the most road.

At the start of the project I didn’t know how to use CAD programs and I also had largely forgotten how to calculate cylinder area and surface area so I had to re-learn the formulas and also learn how to use the CAD program. At around the middle of the project I had learned more or less everything and all I had to do was complete the bridges I had made. Then around the end I had finished more or less all of the bridge. The thing was that we had to make calculations for all of the materials in my bridges and I had not been making the calculations as I was making my shapes which meant I had a big load of work ahead of me. But I did the work although it was boring and frustrating because of how hard it is to get the dimensions of the shapes. But through that I still did it and got the calculations done. Before I had done the calculations I had brainstormed what I wanted to do for the project, and here is what I brainstormed.

What I did was, on the top brainstorm ideas of what I wanted to do and on the bottom, white down all of the formulas that I was going to need later when I had made my bridge.

Now onto the final part, the bridge. For this project I made two bridges. The first was a pretty standard bridge and so was the second. Because my bridges were do standard I decided to take the first bridge and make it be longer and more extravagant. It turned out well and looked much cooler.

Here is the first bridge

Here is the second bridge

Tell me in the comments which one you found better!

It’s time for the Math and my approach towards it, along with how I chose the shapes. For most of the shapes I chose rectangular prisms which you can most likely see all throughout the bridges. Because I used so many rectangular prisms I decided to get some variation throughout the shape and connect the poles on either side with cylinders. I also made the black bars chick are supposed to signify ropes be cylinders. I wanted to also put triangles into the build but I didn’t because there aren’t any place for triangles on the bridges that I made. All in all I think I chose quantity over quality on the bridges, especially the first one and more or less made them totally out of prisms.

Destination Imagination

In this project we made a bridge that had to span 30 cm but could go all the way to spanning two meters. In the project we worked in groups and my group was made up of Keenan, Kate, Randy and myself. Because of the bridge element in the challenge we decided to name our group Low Budget Bridges Co. We all had our separate roles although most of us did at least two things. For example, I made the load test and also helped Keenan with building the bridge.

At the start of the project we got ourselves organized and soon started working. It took a bit to get organized but once we had the organization right we worked well. At first it was more Keenan making the bridge and Kate making the story but soon enough me and Randy joined in. I made the load test and Randy helped Keenan with the bridge. Then, further in I helped Keenan with the bridge and Randy worked with Kate on the backdrop which was made with the package of an old TV that Kate had. We then finished everything we did in the first test play which went as bad as ever, it was a fail. So we improved. It took a long time to build the bridge so I became an angry German tourist who yelled at the bridge workers because they were ruining my vacation. Because I was more of the flex guy and I also watched the others do their parts as I worked, glancing over to see what they were doing. I knew how everything worked, how we made and did it, and how it got done. That was good because I would know how to respond to the judges questions. The second test or rehearsal was better but there was still one problem, the bridge.

For the bridge we decided to make the supports two wide instead of the one support on each side which we had before. We worked on it and then shortly after we made the extra supports it was already time for the DI tournament. On the day of the tournament I wasn’t feeling well. I was tired and feverish. But I still helped and did my part just like the practices before. It all went well except for one thing, the bridge. I think it was partly because of the pressure me and Kate had bestowed upon Keenan and Randy with our drumming which got much too fast way too quick. Although I had tried to take a slower approach to the drumming seeing as the bridge wasn’t doing well I didn’t communicate it with Kate and she just drummed on like the bridge would be built in no time. The bridge mostly didn’t succeed though because the main section of the bridge got slanted to the side because the supports weren’t taped together. It was like putting Lego bricks on top of each other instead of putting them inside of each other.

We discussed what went wrong after the challenge and will be doing a number of things differently and let me take you through them. First off, we will be taking extra tape to the championship. This will make it easier to get the whole bridge to be one piece and therefore not slant to one side. We will also make the pieces easier  to put together and make the bridge look more clean. We will also build and re build the bridge until the construction is flawless, quick, and effective. We will also try to pressure Keenan and Randy less so that they have better working conditions at the championship.

With all of these precautions and extra steps will win both prizes in the next DI championship!

In this project we learned about the Middle Ages but really we learned about the later half of the Middle Ages and not the time after the collapse and fall of Rome. It was a nice project and I enjoyed it. I’m happy for it to continue along with the merging into another project. Throughout it I learned a lot about using keynote and the crusades.                       A picture I drew of a cruisader

In this project we learned first about politics for example we learned about the feudal system and went especially deep into the roles of knights. Second we learned about Charlemagne and the schools he built which were more or less monasteries. Along with that we also learned about the school system in the Middle Ages and what subjects they studied. What we learned wasn’t the fun part. It was how we learned it. Whenever we learned about a new sub-topic we would make a new slide for it and fill it with fun facts and those kinds of things. I think that it was really nice and better than the things we would normally do when we had textbook work.

While we were doing the textbook work we also read a book called the Book of the Lion. It was a rather good book which was about the crusades and a little bit of life in the Middle Ages. It was based off of real events although the characters were fiction. We read it for three weeks and every week we did Lit* circles in groups of six where every week we would switch and everyone do something different. What we did on the textbook sort of coincided with the book and it helped me learn about the Middle Ages a lot more. I think that I will remember it.

Although the book was easy to read it was harder to put the book and all the other work into a bigger picture and the keynote really helped with that. Unlike most of the other humanities projects we didn’t have to write pages upon pages of things this project had everything nice and organized without as much homework.

The topic and the main parts, the book, the presentation, and the keynote were all sort of similar to what we have already done making the tasks a whole lot easier than something which is new altogether (most of the PLP work). I think this was one of the major gains for me because I am very good at using what I have learned. Learning while doing is way harder than learning with something easy and then doing the hard thing once having learned. I’m also better at doing things in very straightforward situations as this project was where I can focus on one task at a time. There are two kinds of minds, one where everything is connected, and the other which goes from box to box. I’m more of someone who thinks in boxes and won’t think about many other aspects of one thing.

After we did all of that work we did one more thing which was a short presentation on how one thing changed from the Middle Ages to now and how one thing continued to be the same. It was a nice process and a light task which I found good although I don’t think that the topics me and my partner chose are going to help me with anything because what do we learn from Middle Ages transportation.

In my view this project was fun and good. I think that if you were to ask me next September “how did society work in the Middle Ages?” I’d be able to give you a satisfying answer. Thank you, čau 4 now!

In this project, we learned a lot about chemistry, but even more about coding. Throughout the project, we did a few experiments and a lot of theorizing, but most of all (in my case at least) what we did was coding, and more or less learning how to code in scratch.

At first, we did a lot of textbook work. It was boring but from the textbooks was how I learned more or less what I needed to know to do the project, although all you really needed to know to do everything but the test was, that atoms go around faster the hotter they are or the more energy they have and the colder they are or the less energy they have, the slower they go.

About the project. I started with trying to do a platformer (like Geometry dash) but after a few days of trying, I realized that coding my game wasn’t just going to be easy. So I re-started completely. I figured out how the functions worked to make a pong like game that steadily speeds up.

CIt was a two player game which was pretty fun. Making it got my knowledge of coding in scratch to a new level and I started on an atom simulator that would be like the one on the website our science teacher showed us. In the end, I didn’t do it fully because of some functions not working as planned and because I couldn’t do something which would more or less do if TEMP = 520 delete scratch H and scratch O, If TEMP = 520 run scratch H2O. Maybe there is some way to do that in scratch but for now I have no idea.

Now onto what I learned, didn’t learn, and what challenged me the most. I learned a lot about molecular theory, the formation of elements, and the kinetic molecular theory. It wasn’t challenging to learn it once you figured it out. I learned it and went on. Then there came the challenging part which was the coding. The coding was hard because no one knew that well how to code in scratch and we had to learn by testing different functions. It took a while to do so and when I got to the level that I was better than someone who just started but not good enough to make a good game. So, now I can more or less understand the statements but not fully incorporate them and know how to do what I should do to do what I want to do.

I think that in the end I did learn a lot about atoms and molecular theory and I also learned a lot about coding in scratch. I think that the people at scratch HQ should put in more functions and IF statements. It was a fun project and and I’m excited for the next one which if my sources are correct will, be about math 🙂 Because math is my favourite part of science.

Now onto the part where I talk about the competencies.

We did a lot of teamwork throughout the project although I should’ve lead my group to have the work more equally distributed and not as much with me doing one thing and my other group members, especially Nathan not knowing what to do for most of the time. Next time I will try to make the groups I work in more socialist and democratic instead of a capitalist dictatorship

Star Wars

A somewhat long time ago in a galaxy approximately 1 kilometre away, our glorious teacher told us about the next big project we were going to do. A Star Wars themed mini Blue Sky project. She said that it would be huge, great, and a ton of work. I didn’t have much of a clue about what it was going to end up like, but I was ready to learn.

The first work we did within the project was the how might we or HMW form which was how we would figure out what we were going to do. The form wasn’t the best way for me to get an idea and instead of having ideas from the HMW’s, I got ideas by brainstorming driving questions.

Once I had brainstormed a few driving questions I selected one and did the rest of the sheet based on it. That’s what I did for Idea 2 until I realized that idea 3 would be much more realistic and so in the end I decided to go with Idea 3. My driving question for idea 3 was “How come most of the planets in Star Wars have only one biome opposed to Earth which has poles and many different biomes in its regions?” This kind of question looking back at it, isn’t the best kind of driving question to have for a project because it doesn’t have a direct answer and the indirect answer can’t be built on the budget of spare cardboard, paper, glue, and stuff from the trash.

The next thing we did was ask tons of questions which we would have to answer using google. It was an easy task and only took an hour or so to complete.

Whenever I came up with a question I’d write it down on the sheet. If I were just reading a book and my mind wandered off to and idea I’d write it down on the sheet. If I were eating and thinking and I got an idea I’d write it down on the sheet. If I were biking home and I got an idea I’d bike home and write it down on the sheet. In total I got 21 questions and some of them even helped me out a little bit. I learned from that assignment that the best questions come in the worst environments, where it takes you a few minutes before you can write it down.

After that we did the inquiry which was more or less a simple plan for what we wanted to do.

For me that was restating things and saying the obvious. It wasn’t much of a process and in the end I didn’t do it perfectly either. It didn’t teach me much but I think that had I given it more effort I would’ve gotten it better than that.

Around the time when we learned about all of those things we also learned about and used the LAUNCH cycle. In the LAUNCH cycle L = look, listen and learn. A = ask tons of questions. U = understand the problem or process. N = navigate ideas. C = create a prototype. H = highlight and fix and then LAUNCH to the audience.

You can see that the work that we did reflected the LAUNCH cycle and that we were then on the create a prototype phase. So I built a prototype, or at least tried to because half way through I realized I didn’t have all the parts. So instead of making a prototype I drew one, listed all the materials, and fixed what I saw wrong in my original plan. It worked out and the real thing was as good as ever. I didn’t take any pictures of it though, because I had different things on my mind but I can tell you how my presentation would go.

First I’d point at my model planet and say this is a Star Wars grass or forest planet. It might be able to exist if it were rotating around the sun at the same distance all year round, and have the same amount of sunlight on every spot. This means that it couldn’t have an axis which makes the planets have poles which are the cold spots. Or have a really weird axis which is more or less not even an axis. Now there are also planets like Coruscant which are city planets which could be Earth in a few millions of years if we do everything right. It could just be that a city covered the whole world and by dong that covered all the water sources, therefore making there be no more clouds. Because clouds or water vapour makes up 50% of the greenhouse affect we would have to replace that with something and my guess would be that the C02 emitted from people would replace the water. I don’t know how they’d get the oxygen but food and water can be imported. Then the last kinds of planets are planets like Tatooine and Hoth which are ice and desert planets. Hoth could be Earth in the Ice Age or just a planet far away from the sun and Tatooine is a desert planet which resembles a Mad Max wasteland and something from a future where Trump gets re-elected, or people don’t pay attention to climate change. There’s one more kind of planet and that is the tropical planet where the big battle in Rouge One takes place. That could be a planet with a strong greenhouse affect and lot of water on the surface.

Reflecting on the project, I could have done it better but I’m contempt with the outcome. I know what to change for the better next time and what to keep. A project from which I learned about doing projects. See you next time, goodbye. 👋