This project continued directly after the Argh Matey, or the project in which we learned about (for Hum.) explorers in the new world and their the only difference is that my project from the last project was in N. Mexico whereas this time our projects had to be based in New France. In it we had to research and write a story based around an object which was real and most likely found by archeologists.

The main task of the project was to write a short story about the object. My book was about a Rifle but mostly centred around the person who possessed it, because I’m really a lot better at writing about people than I am about objects and fiction is just a lot easier to write. The story itself is about a boy but I don’t want to spoil it so, enjoy.

For this project we had to plan a road trip. Because it was sciematics it was more centred around the budgeting aspect of it and how long or short we could make the road trip with our daily and start up expenses.

The project started out as they all do, with a mind map and in it we put what we knew and what questions we had about the project. The only bad part of the mind map was that because I had already asked all of the questions in class I just made something which was just a bunch of statements.

The rest of the project was more or less learning about the math and the big idea and doing the main assignment which was to plan out a road trip with 10,000 dollars. So when the time came I just drew up where I wanted to go on a map, got the link to a 350 dollar car on Ebay, and calculated. I also did the project so I started out with 10,000 Cayman Islands dollars because they’re the highest worth dollars.

This is where I went, as you had seen I went through Europe, Russia, then the Peoples Republic of China, and ended in the capital of Vietnam. Now onto the part of the project which our teacher actually had to mark which were the expenses and the graph.

What I did for this is that I put all of my extra expenses and start up costs in at the start because I’d pre pay the expensive activities and try not to carry too much money on me for my safety. I then put all of my averages per “zone” and averaged them out which made the line, although I should have made there be multiple points so it was more accurate. The daily costs were food and gas as well as the occasional accommodation.

Now onto the competency.

Throughout this project I learned about averages and how to calculate the daily costs into graphs. Although the math was pretty easy I think that the hardest part was learning how to use the app which displayed the graph and writing my costs out into a readable equation.

I enjoyed this project and look forward to more like it.

I don’t work well under pressure

Today I want to focus on an ongoing issue which I think I need to get over which is that when I get a lot of big assignments at once I tend to put them all off and do other things. I more or less do anything which keeps my mind off of the work which doesn’t make the due date just magically go away. Another thing I do is that I work on an assignment for a few hours and then have to go to an event or a meeting after which I see that the assignment is still there and instead of getting it done I procrastinate even more that’s why, just now I barely got any schoolwork done but I read over 300 pages of a book that I got three days ago. Now as you’d know if you read my other post I wanted to play less vidiogames which I do but I more or less replaced that form of entertainment with reading.

The projects

I think that I do the projects well and mostly on time. The only part of the projects that I really struggle on is the end when all of the projects come to an end. I struggle on this because all of the work more or less comes at once and just I lose it. I do things half way and in the end I’m overdue. That doesn’t always happen and it doesn’t happen when I do a few key things which are that I work on the projects all day all week and get the things I need to make the grand goal possible.

What to do

I think that with a bit of luck and a better schedule I’ll be better with the ends of the projects. I’ll also try to work ahead so that when the finishing sprint comes I only have to jog because I ran a bit faster than the big bad deadline.

Some of my better projects

Although I did badly at the ends of a few projects I have been ever increasing the amount of good projects. A good example of that is the maker project witness to history where I used a high percentage of my time to take the pictures beforehand and I then just needed one day to get it all done. That contrasts on the other project I had which was Argh Mighty where I used the time for the other project and I was late on it.

Outro

What I will do in grade nine is try to leverage the projects out a bit more and get it all done. I think that as I get older and better at working I’ll also not get as much in late and maybe next year I’ll get everything in on time.

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).

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!