The Middle Ages

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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.

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.

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

Chemistry Coding

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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.

My Mpol post

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Through the start of this year I have been learning a lot. I learned less about the subject of the projects than I did about how to actually do the projects. The only thing I learned about that doesn’t make me not learn about how to do the projects is math even though in math the project is the subject. If you want to know a lot about math go to the end. 

The first thing I think I really learned about was time management and always having time for homework. So lets start with Maker. At the start of the year we did the Big Life Journal. The big life journal was very fun and only got difficult with the last few chapters where there was a little bit more thinking involved. It was about what you want to be when you grow up and how you will get it. So logically I didn’t do it well and I kind of learned my first big lesson, time management. Every two days, or every maker class one chapter was due. Because I go climbing Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I only had one evening to work on it and a lot of the time the evenings were already take up by stuff I do with my family like going on walks until dinner and then bedtime. This can even reflect on now where I have a friend from Mexico over and we spend most of the weekends and after school outside. The day before my Mpol presentation we went skiing from school time until 10pm and I didn’t do any homework at all. On Sunday we went hiking for 5 hours and  because we had a late start and I only did homework in the evening. But that’s not all. I procrastinate a lot. When I have time to do work I think about playing games and doing other stuff instead. In the morning I play with lego, and in the evening I sit around and look at it along with my other toys or play computer games. I know I really shouldn’t but it’s not like the assignment is due tomorrow.

Time management is definably something I need to and will continue working on because in almost every project I do, I procrastinate up to the last second because I want to just enjoy myself instead of doing the homework I know I’ll have to do sometime anyways.

The second thing that I learned about except this time I succeeded at it was my Growth Mindset. I think this is because I already had a growth mindset before, or at least that’s what it felt like. I’m always open to learning new things. It’s fun to figure out an equation or solve a problem and that’s fun. That’s why I’m good at having a growth mindset. But this is about what I want to improve and not what I’m already good at. In my growth mindset I still need to improve some things like being open to different ways of solving problems and different styles. For example I’m not that good at writing in some more philosophical ways. I like everything to be strait forward and there being a straight up answer for everything. PLP has taught me that in most scenarios it’s not that way and you need to plan ahead a lot. 

So because of those two factors and a few more minor factors I decided to make my question: “How can I improve my learning from mistakes?” Or more or less  “How can I effectively learn from my mistakes?” 

Because throughout the last few months I made a lot of mistakes. I made them because PLP was teaching me and showing me things and ways to do things that I had never before done. A good example of that is the sciematics book about plate tectonics and tectonic plates which I had done wrong in many ways, the first of which was that my book wasn’t interesting and second because I didn’t include enough of my knowledge about tectonics in it even though I fully understood the process of all of the tectonics from how earthquakes can form to how and why Hawaii is slowly moving South-East. Having not done something like a book for kids about scientific subjects before (looking back at it I know what I should have done and what I will do better next time) I didn’t really know how to write it. 

There is one last thing I want to talk about and it’s something completely different. It’s PGP. PGP is one of the funnest school projects I ever did. Not because of what the work was, but more majorly about how we did it. We went to Oregon and I learned a lot about a lot of different things. To this day I don’t entirely know what the project was about and why it didn’t feel like so much work but I can take my guesses and most of the time my guesses/hypothesis’s are correct and on track. I think that most of all the PGP project was to find out how well we worked, how efficiently we used our time, and to piece together this puzzle which is our class in PLP (kind of like a bonding activity). 

I have a goal for this year of PLP, well actually I have two. The first one is to use my time more wisely and efficiently and the second is to not play any video game by my birthday. Lets start with the first goal, using all of my time efficiently. I chose this goal above all others because it’s one of my worst habits. Playing, talking (I’ve already stopped messaging) and not doing schoolwork with my friends during class is hard to resist and so is just giving up on the homework I’ve got to do and just reading or playing video games. Would you rather be writing a blog post about your school year and what you want to do, or read a nice book while enjoying a great tasty drink of your choice (in my case either milk or fruit tea(rum with fruits and then boiling water added to it) which are both yummy). See? No one likes to work except those people, and at least for when I’m in PLP I need to be one of those people. I just need to motivate myself with some message like if you don’t do your homework Satan will get you or something along those lines. Now onto stop playing video games, which is just mental effort, but I have better things to do like reading books.

One last thing, which is math. I want to exclude math because it doesn’t really fall into what PLP stands for. It’s straightforward and easy to do unless you don’t learn the equations or have a fixed mindset. I myself am good at math and love learning new equations. In grade six I had a teacher who didn’t teach us anything about math and then I learned what I should’ve learned in a whole year in just three weeks. It was thrilling and fun. But most of all straightforward. In math you don’t have to learn a lot of names and it’s all just numbers which couldn’t be more straightforward if you did all you could to make it. So all in all, I like to do math and it’s my favourite subject which doesn’t involve sports. 

I don’t know which message you get from that but what I’m sending is that I’m learning how to do things and when I crack the code or figure out the secret, and I will do that, I’m going to make PLP be one of my best learning experiences ever, and I’m going to make it count.

The mini Blue Sky Project

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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. 👋

LASER

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For this project we made right triangles with lasers and did some math about the pythagorean theorem (A squared + B squared = C squared) which I felt was easy. What was hard for this project was making the models accompanying the right triangles. This also took the longest time. In my opinion it took the longest time because we didn’t organize it enough. So let me tell you about what we did and learned within this project.

We started with the basics. We did some math, learned more about the Pythagorean theorem and built up on the knowledge we already had. 

Second we learned about mirrors and light from a textbook and from our teacher. I’d say that to better understand light you should learn about speed, how the wave frequencies affect different colours, and how light is both a particle and a wave. This is because it’s hard to explain light in any easy and short way.

In between the learning we worked on a mind map to keep everything on track.

The big project was to make a right triangle out of one laser and mirrors. This in theory and in practice, if you only set up the laser triangle is pretty easy although if you want to make the laser triangle on convincing models of Star Wars ships made out of cardboard floating in the air it takes a bit of work.

For my group we made a model Death Star and two model star destroyers out of cardboard. As I worked on the Death Star, while Randy made the star destroyers. It was a long and dull process which was too much work for the result. The ratio of working on the actual laser compared to making the model was 1 to 10.

Then at the end of the project we set up our laser triangle which was sitting in position. So we carried it to the room. Unfortunately we dropped it and one of the star destroyers broke off. Because of this we had to improvise. We set the Death Star along with the first star destroyer a bit lower than usual and positioned the third model up on a separate platform. It worked out in the end and looked great except for the star destroyers being five times the size they are in Star Wars compared to the Death Star. Thanks to Randy who built the star destroyers I designed and designed the laser triangle and Nathan who did “research”.

Reflection on the Student Blogging Challenge

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For the last few weeks I have as many others have been doing the Student Blogging Challenge. It was fun and I did a lot of work on it. So lets do a recount of all the blog posts which were in it.

the first one I did was about something I liked. I chose my favourite toy, Lego.

This one was short and more or less just me writing about my love of Lego and what I like to do with it. I’m building a train station out of lego right now and am hoping to have it done by Christmas. It’s coming along bit by bit and I’m happy with the process.

It’s building process was straight forward. I first spent hours looking through my lego box looking for pieces and then when I thought I had enough I started building the design I was and still am boing for is simple. A tiny platform In the middle and a big platform on the left side. From the photo you can see that I haven’t yet put the track in for the left side and that’s because it was easier to build the middle platform without it. If you’re wondering about the crossing, I built that earlier.

Wait one second! I just completed a little bit more!

But that’s still not the whole thing done. I have a lot more to do. Onto the next assignment!

 

It was about pictures and copyright.

It was the only assignment that didn’t spark any joy, meaning I didn’t get much out of it or in other words, I didn’t learn much from it. I just wrote about the flaws and problems of copyright and that was it.

Next up..

Music!! For music I made a playlist on YouTube, made a quiz about music, and I wrote about an instrument which I play but you have to guess. It was fun to write up and especially fun to do the play list because for the playlist because I got to listen to music for an hour.

Then up next were…

Emojis! Although not as fun as music the blog post about emojis was also quite fun. First I said some facts about emojis and included a graph of all the first ones. Then I did a guess the country quiz and then a math question, both are easy. After that I made a series of emojis that describe me and made an emoji of my face by using an app called “Emoji Me”.

After that for the latest one I did the one about My Holidays. I wrote about all of them but narrowed out on one in particular which is the Czech way of celebrating Easter. After that I also made a poem about holidays in general.

 

All of the Blogging Challenge has been fun and not a waste of time. Every week as my life was going on I would sit down for an hour or two and write these posts. They varied but were always fun and about fun subjects which I would happily write about without being made to. Thank you, goodbye.

My holidays

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My family celebrates many of the same holidays as every European or Canadian, but some we celebrate slightly differently, like Christmas where we stay up late around the Christmas tree waiting until our parents decide to put the presents under the tree.
When I was four I first encountered Halloween when two American girls dressed convincingly as witches knocked on our door and said trick or treat then explained in German with heavy American accents what the holiday was. My dad gave them a bit of candy. Then the next year, after we moved to Canada I went trick or treating for the first time. I went with my mum as I didn’t speak much English at the time.
We also celebrate Thanksgiving, our birthdays, Easter, and Silvester also known as New Years Eve.
My favourite holidays are my birthday and Christmas. They’re my favourite holidays because on those days I get presents either from family of from my friends as they do from me on their birthdays and Christmas.

There is one holiday I would like to speak about little more.

In the Czech Republic Easter is celebrated a bit differently. There for Easter the boys go to a willow tree, take of some twigs and make things that are almost like whips. They then go and get to chase girls around with them. I never celebrated it although one time my mum made one of the things out of the branches of the tree.

Another traditions is painting of the Easter eggs. We sometimes hang the coloured eggs on the tree, but that is more a German tradition.

My mom also bakes the Easter bread or Easter lam.

 

That you can make yourself a better picture, here is a Video about Czech Easter traditions.

 

 

Now for a poem

There are many holidays

For you an adult pays

for the gifts kids receive

More than you’d believe

they are fun

until they’re done

but of fun toys there’s a ton

And then we get supermarket kinder egg or Christmas light blow out sales.

The artsy project

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This project was about art. Not just any art though, it was about art on the iPad. Throughout it we learned about tracing, making logos, sketch-noting, and about all the different settings there were on the apps that our school had so givingly provided for us. Let me tell you up font that I am not an artist. It never interested me and doesn’t have much of a real purpose other than to be something cool to look at or to mean something which helps you remember something but you can also write notes instead of sketch notes.

Our first assignment was a drawing of our names, word art.

This was pretty easy and for it I tried to make the first letter of my name be the 20th century fox logo but as you can see I can’t say I succeeded. I didn’t learn much from it and I didn’t feel empowered while making it.

The second one was sketch notes. I was so bad at doing them that I didn’t even draw most of the words. I even tried twice to get it right.

I’m just not the right kind of person. I’m not someone who organizes their thoughts  and I almost never write what I watched in a video down. The only time I do is when someone tells me to and even then I write it down and don’t draw it. I wasn’t empowered within this although I do think I learned a little.

 

The next milestone was a self portrait. And guess what! I wasn’t the best at that either.

It was good enough but could have been better. I think that I was quite empowered at the start but slowly found out that I was still very bad at drawing. It looked much better when I left the original image in. So better luck next time.

 

The next project went way better than the first. Mostly because of a major breakthrough of my knowledge of sketches pro.

And the breakthrough was that if you hold on a colour with your finger you will get its exact colour. It worked really well. You can see how well it worked up top on the picture. For this picture I was very empowered as I had found something which would help me for that picture. And I think for many more in the future. It really put me a whole different mindset about drawing things on an iPad.

 

The last milestone, the logo.

This logo was for a bouldering gym much like the one that I go to, the Hive. It was a cool logo and I had traced people climbing on it. It didn’t look good enough because it was just alone with nothing to give it form or to tell its size with so I put the climbing wall behind it. I was empowered throughout its making because I liked how it looked and how I traced the people on the letters to look like they were actually climbing on them.

 

From the project I learned quite a lot of useful things for school like kind of learning how to sketch-note and learning how to trace things but I mostly learned nifty tricks for the school provided app we used and for art on the iPad in general. But school is just for learning so now for how I felt empowered.

 

For the first three assignments I wasn’t or I lost my sense of empowerment. Then it all changed with my finding of the tricks and me finally getting used to the app itself. I was also drawing things which I would look at and actually liked. Here’s a drawing which I think shows my learning and also to my eye looks good.

Emojis

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Today it is all about Emojis! The first emoji were created in 1999 by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita.  The original 176 emojis were mostly symbols.

Some were informative but some emoji made it possible to add emotional context to a message.

First emoji was only available on computer. Apple added an official emoji keyboard in 2011 and Android in 2013.

Since 2015 you can change the skin colour on emoji and you can find all types of people and cultures and recently gender neutral emoji was added.

 

Using emojis is fun and emojis are still being developed.

Ok, I have now some fun riddles for you.

 

Guess the country!

Click here to see a quiz/video where you have to guess which country the emojis stand for!

 

Fun Math!

Do a math quiz to test your skills and IQ.

🚣🏻‍♀️+🥳+🤖=88

🚣🏻‍♀️×🚣🏻‍♀️×🥳=2,240

🥳+🥳+🥳=105

🤖+🤖×🤖=?

 

Btw.

Do you know who this is?

Of course, it’s me!

I had fun with this post!

The ad project

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  • The second business

  • I hope you enjoyed

I hope you enjoyed my slider!

Now onto what I learned during the project and the steps and milestones that we worked on and did.

The first thing we did was a dissection of an ad. The ad was called Welcome Home, was made by apple.inc. We hadn’t learned anything about ads so the teachers most likely didn’t think that we would through out words like pathos, egos or logos and didn’t think that we would say a lot of stuff about advertising techniques other than what we felt and thought that other people would feel while watching the ad. Looking back at it I would surely say that it was directed at your pathos side because of the story that it told.

Paragraph on the ad “Welcome Home” by Apple I’d say that it communicates to the viewer by dance and by the expressions of the character. The story starts out with the actress being all lonely, sad and depressed and then coming home and having the HomePod play some music that she likes. She then really gets into the music and dances around the house and the house gets bigger. The house getting bigger is most likely supposed to mean something like her ego or her amount of happiness expanding until she is confronted with a mirror of herself, what she is. So, inspired or rather driven by the music, she works around it and smiles at her reflection. She then makes the mirror bigger and sort of plays with the other version of herself to the rhythm of the music. The song starts to end and she gets back into the real world. The target audience of this ad in my understanding is the hard-working people who live in the city and don’t have much money lying around. Apple wants them to think that the Apple HomePod will make them happy and make their apartments seem bigger. They also want the viewer to know, that it has Siri built into it and that’s why the actress says “hi Siri, play me something I like”. The Apple HomePod also has a very good sound system built into it and I think that’s why Apple went for a music video to advertise their version of the Amazon Alexa. I also have some things I want to say about the ad. In the ad, the main character does everything alone suggesting she is lonely. And she also looks sad and depressed. This isn’t going to get families with kids to buy the product more than less. It’s also not the newest thing as there is already a Google Home and the Amazon Alexa. I would predict that this product won’t get that many sales just for that reason. alone. The video is also a bit off topic because its more of a music video than an ad for the Apple HomePod. With all these factors in my perspective it’s a bad ad.

After that we had to read a book and do reflections on it. I don’t feel that I learned much from it so I’ll leave that out entirely.

After that the next assignment was an advertising survey we were going to survey older people like our parents to see their views on ads and other things around advertising like logos and if they collect any ads.

This taught me that I’m not that different from my dad as I have almost the same standards.

Advertising Survey I’d say that the collections and ads will only differ depending on who the person advertising is. There is also a difference in the fact that my dad was born in the DDR, one of the republics of the USSR. It was a socialist republic so the only ads would be propaganda films and things like that. Then there also weren’t TV’s and computers for everybody back then so that means the only ads you would get were print ads in the news. Nowadays though we all have the same ads and the only thing that differs is our responses to them. For each question below, write your response in full sentences. You should write at least 3 sentences for each question. Be prepared to share your responses with the class. Do you collect any ads or advertising products? (e.g. Coca-Cola, Starbucks mugs) Jakub: I collect beer lids, and those clothes size thingies from winners. These all cost no money. Papa: no Do you have any clothing with a visible designer name? (e.g. Old Navy) Give examples. Jakub: I don’t care about that sort of stuff so most likely yes but I don't know. Papa: maybe Do you have any clothing with a visible designer logo? (e.g. Nike) Give examples. Jakub: One hand me down puma shirt but that’s pretty much it. Papa: maybe Have you ever bought any products based solely on advertising? Which and why Jakub: Yes. I have influenced my mom to buy movie tickets. Papa: probably. But I can’t remember Have you ever not bought products specifically based on advertising? Which and why? Jakub: no because I don’t research products that I buy and the ads about the product doesn’t make the product any better or worse. Papa: Yes, if they need advertising to push their product, that’s suspicious. List the places where you think you see advertising on a daily basis: Jakub: YouTube. I’m even listening to music right now as I vaccume. Papa: web pages, YouTube, Street signs

School wise I learned about how the ads in everyday life aren’t so convincing and that young people look for the same properties in advertising as older people. If I’m the average young person which my teachers tell me I am not (I am little bit more vocal than my friends). But that’s a discussion for another time.

I also learned that all the way back, when most of east Europe was still under the iron curtain which was the USSR and the East/West German wall had just come down, in the Eastern Block the ads still had the same properties and were never advertising things or services which people didn’t want.

Video ad

Onto the next assignment. This assignment was notes on a video that we watched about advertising in our generation. It was interesting but I’m not good at taking notes or remembering a video I watched two months ago. Along with that we had an assignment about what the advantages are with print ads VS online ads. For this we were supposed to use pathos, ethos and logos but it didn’t really need those so we wrote down the most obvious with the biggest factors.

Commercial ad and target audience

The next assignment we had was a commercial dig. For it we were answering questions. The first question was, does what you watch appeal to you? Or something along those lines.

So my answer was, Yes otherwise I wouldn’t watch videos or TV I only choose what I like and the ads are normally not what I like unless they’re car ads.

We also learned how target audience is important for ads.

Target Audience: What is your demographic?

The demographic of what I watched was most likely old people, Germans and train enthusiasts. I’d say that the age group for this kind of thing is 20-80 years old. Not necessarily parents. So no. For the second ad, it was a car and not a train. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t for train enthusiasts but it might have been.

 

Do the ads you watch make you more inclined to do things?

The ads are but merely a waste of my time. They don’t have much affect on me unless they’re movie trailer because those are fun to watch. If I’m watching a movie on TV and the movie is also on Netflix I wont watch the movie on TV because of the ads.

 

Can ads hurt people? How?

Ads can’t directly hurt anybody unless a billboard falls on you but the outcome of the ad can have indirect consequences like the Juul ads made kids vape, ads from the Russians elected Trump, Nazi propaganda started WWII. The Nazi’s advertised prosperity and to unite the country and did almost the exact opposite.

From this I learned and thought about how apps like YouTube make ads. Directly for you and your demographic but also show the ads which were payed the most money for. I also thought a lot about how ads can mess with campaigns and make parties and people seem better than they are, false advertising. This was also one of the first assignments we did where the demographic for which the ad was, was spoken about.

 

Appeals of advertisement

The next assignment was about the appeals of advertisements. For it we looked at pathos, ethos, logos and other advertising strategies. For the assignment, we would take five different car ads and then write about how they showed pathos, ethos, logos, and other advertising strategies. Here is an example of one.


 

The people going into the Volkswagen are all happy and clearly want to go to the beach. This would tell the audience that this van is going to bring fun to the buyer and their families.
You could get more people into it than any other minivan at the time. This would appeal to people with big families or people who would want to go camping. .
There’s nothing that’s supposed to be just for trust but the line of happy people to the Volkswagen is way more trustworthy than a Volkswagen just standing alone because of empathy and those sorts of feelings

Through this I learned about pathos, ethos and logos. I also learned just how many methods of persuasion are used in ads. Depending on the target audience the ad would differ. For example a car ad targeted to a soccer mum will show kids going in it and soccer related things. It might have something with logos and say that it has got the perfect equipment and the perfect shape to take your kids wherever you need to. If it‘s an ad for a gadget of toy then it might have have things for how it makes you so much happier and have lots of happy people using it.

There’s nothing that’s supposed to be just for trust but the line of happy people to the Volkswagen is way more trustworthy than a Volkswagen just standing alone because of empathy and those sorts of feelings.

There are a lot of techniques for advertising different products and services. Here are some of the ones that we learned about.

1. Weasel Words: a message or promise is implied but not definite; they are empty claims.

2. Unfinished Claims: a comparison is started but left unfinished; they are dangling claims.

3. ‘We’re different and unique’ Claim: states there is nothing else quite like the advertised product.

4. ‘Water is Wet’ Claim: the claim is true for any brand in that product category.

5. ‘So What’ Claim: the claim is true but gives no real advantage to the product.

6. Vague Claim: uses colourful words that are totally meaningless, overlaps with #1.

7. Scientific or Statistical Claim: uses scientific proof, numbers or impressive ingredients to support the product’s superiority.

8. ‘Compliment the Consumer’ Claim: flatters the potential customer.

9. Testimonial: uses celebrities or authorities to speak on the product’s behalf.

10. Rhetorical Question: asks a question that the viewer is supposed to answer in a way that affirms a product’s goodness.

11. Name Calling: makes fun of or is unflattering about the competition.

12. Plain Folks: uses average, typical people.

 

Ways to get your message to your target audience

Even with the best ads your ad wont get anyone to buy your product unless there‘s a good way to get your ad to the people. That‘s why it‘s good to know which apps to use and where to advertise. This picture can give you a few hints.

 

To sum it all up I learned about advertising techniques, pathos, ethos and logos, target demographics which are just groups of people who like the same thing. I also learned how to take my work and the feedback I got on it and combine them to make my work be in the end better. To do this, I would mostly make small changes but mostly, especially at the start or when I didn’t know what I wanted to do or didn‘t do what I was going for I‘d make all-out changes and go from that. You can see that from the slider at the start of my trial and error.