Monthly Archives: April 2019

What’s the Matter? (Cycles)

What’s happening, trusty readers? Not so good? You-oh. Oh, jeez. That sounds terrible.

Just kidding. Today we’re gonna dive deep into a cloud of methane and science. That’s right. We’re talking ‘bout the matter cycles.

So, to start off our unit, we looked at a trusty Crash Course video. As always, the link should be right under this sentence.

After that, we got grouped up and picked our cycles for our project. The Great Amelia B. and I chose the carbon cycle for our project. Oh, the project! Right. Our project for this unit was to identify a negative impact on your cycle and create something (organism, system) that helped reduce that effect.

We of course identified global warming as the negative effect on our cycle, and we quickly found methane to be a huge part of the problem. Methane traps 25 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon, and is abundant in our atmosphere, so reducing that would be a huge benefit to our planet.

Throughout this unit, we’ve learned about food chains, trophic levels, and levels of consumers. We also took place in a debate over which cycle is “best”. (Spoiler Alert, we didn’t win)

Time flew by, and within a while, we had already made a KeyNote presentation to present our solution, which involves taking methane from a barn, chilling and liquefying it, and reacting it with a zeolite to turn it into methanol, an environmentally safe-er fuel. Full presentation down below.

[Insert Video Here]

Also, as is the case with all of my science projects, I made a mind map. No explanation needed.

Now, despite what you may think, this post is not to explain my unit and project. No, no, no. It’s for presenting the big c’s. Curricular Competencies. Yeah. I’ve done plenty of science posts before, so I’ll cut right to the chase.

Use Knowledge of Scientific Concepts to Draw Conclusions that are Consistent with Evidence

Long title aside, this competency had to do with my knowledge of ever-changing environmental variables, and how all cycles are interconnected. I think we demonstrated our understanding very well, as we had slides explaining the effects and consequences on all cycles, and accounted for all variables, such as rising sea levels, and raising temperatures.

We used examples from nitrogen-lacking carbon sinks and rising ocean levels to display our learning and everything we learned about the cycles, not just our own, but also the nitrogen, water, and phosphorus cycles.

Evaluate the Validity and Limitations of a Model or Analogy in Relation to the Phenomenon Modelled

I think this competency was something we unknowingly did pretty well at. Throughout the entire project, we constantly questioned ourselves with “Is this realistic?” and “What other problems could this bring?”. With some advice from our teacher, we investigated every possible aspect of our project. Cost, comparison to other carbon-saving machines, timing, exact measurements and calculations, as well as the exact number of cows needed for an effective 14-day system.

Formulate Multiple Hypotheses and Predict Multiple Outcomes

Throughout our project, we’ve always looked at alternate methods and failsafes in case something does terribly wrong. We’ve looked at multiple outcomes, multiple new innovations and tried to use average numbers for our calculations because, of course, nothing ever stays the same. Maybe one day, the cows have an off day. Maybe another day, the cows are like gas machines. All these variables must be accounted for, and we’ve done our best to make these visible and important in our project.

Throughout this project, I’ve learned and refreshed a lot of information on food chains, trophies levels, and consumers (not people who buy a lot of merchandise, things that eat other things). However, the key pieces I learned in elementary school were still here and better than ever. This unit was a refreshment from the horrors of like terms and polynomials (jk) and was a huge help in my scientific studies.

This is Jason, signing off.

Time 2 DI

DI happened.

We got second.

Thanks for reading.

Just kidding. As you all know, after regionals come provincials, and this post is all about the magic of provincials.

So, after regionals, a lot about our performance changed. For one, we lost a group member. No, he didn’t die, but unfortunately, Caleb, (AKA Moses) was unable to come to provincials, so we had to rewrite our story. However, it may have been a blessing in disguise, as we smoothed out all the lumps in our story and it turned out better than ever.

For the most part, I’ll handle this post as I did the regional post. I’ll go section by section and talk about what changed.

Story

Our original story was about three good friends on vacation in Costa Rica, but because one of our characters was no longer here, we had to revise it. This was our new story.

Mee (Sam) And Yu (Amelia) are siblings on vacation in Costa Rica. They go to party, but Mee ends up contracting musical hallucinations. They go to see Dr. Martin (Alex), but he is not of much help. Stuck, they decide to move on and go on a jungle tour with Mr. Martin (Alex again), until Martin warns them of a witch doctor in the area and drops his map. The siblings take the map and go to find the witch doctor. The group is separated, but Mee And Yu find The Witch Doctor (Jason). The witch doctor gives Mee antidepressants to help stifle his hallucinations and the two siblings leave. On their way back, they get a ride from Martin (Alex, again) with Martin’s Cab Service.

As you can see, quite a bit changed with the loss of one character, which goes to show how important everything is in a destination imagination challenge.

Sympt-O-Matic

Now, for the Sympt-O-Matic, we took out the original drawings on the interior of the skull model, and we put in new, coloured drawings for the circuit to light up. Also, if you watched the regional performance, you’d know that we didn’t really have a stand for the Sympt-O-Matic, and it just sat on the ground in 2 pieces. We made soooooo many repairs to the Sympt-O-Matic this time around. So many that I need a separate paragraph just to explain them.

So, the biggest struggle with fixing up the Sympt-O-Matic was the fact that it was lopsided, so it kept falling over, taking a toll on both its structural integrity and our patience. To fix that, I went out, bought a big ol’ bag of stir sticks, and we attached them to the base of the crooked side, and that way, it stood up much better. We also attached a makeshift “hinge” by attaching many layers of duct tape to the back side of Sympt-O-Matic, making it able to open and close. Nice.

Double Vision

Double Vision didn’t really change. The story aspect stayed the same, but the stage blocking changed. Our idea went through a few changes, starting with draping camouflage material over a hook at the top-middle of the backdrop. This idea was quickly veto’ed, and turned into gluing sticks and other material onto a wooden base to separate the stage.

Also, sorry for the lack of photos. You’ll see everything together in the performance video.

The team choice elements didn’t change, so I won’t explain that, so here comes the day of.

The Day Of

We only had a month between regionals and provincials, and the progress we made was incredible. It was like we had separate performances rather than a revised performance. However, the day of DI came with its own set of problems.

First, the backdrop. I haven’t gone into much detail over the backdrop, but it was pretty much an 8 foot long, 6 foot tall wooden frame nailed to a platform with paper draping down from it. The backdrop was a big issue on the day of, because, as you may have read, it was 8 foot long, 6 foot wide. Not good. Our genius idea was to take it apart beforehand, and piece it back together on the day of, like a pit crew.

This worked… to some extent.

Thing is, we ended up SCREWING the backdrop together, and NAILING it back together. But, we didn’t take out the screws beforehand, so they were pretty much stuck. However, we were able to get hold of an electric screwdriver, which came in clutch and allowed us to piece together our backdrop, with the help of some counterweights.

After that, we got dressed, I got painted up, and we set up. The performance can be seen right down here.

We ended up placing 2nd, out of 5 teams, which was pretty cool. We took home a considerably sized trophy, and I kept my streak of placing in the podium.

Reflection

So, in the regionals post, I talked about how I wanted to improve my communication skills, and my god, we did it. Our Basecamp (group chat) usage skyrocketed and we talked so much about everyone’s roles, our progress and we were able to improve all of our scores and aspects of our challenge in the span of 2 school weeks (and spring break).

Something else I think we did well was thinking on our feet. Throughout all the misfortune, we improvised and got everything done. For example, Caleb (Moses) not being able to come to provincials – we got a new story. Backdrop was in pieces with screws in it – we removed and reused screws to put it back together. Definitely a strong point for our group throughout the process.

Now, I talked about the knowledge that I gained in the regionals post, and not much about the disease changed. However, DI provincials was as much of a learning experience as regionals. The process of revising and refining just helped my hone my revision skills onto specific topics (Story Improvement, Model-making). The knowledge that I learned not only in this year’s DI, but in last year’s as well will definitely culminate and make next year’s DI one to remember.

This is Jason, signing off.

insert DI pun here

What’s good fellow bloggers. As you can tell by my creative title, we’re tackling the big fish in this post. A topic so big it requires 2 posts to cover it. That is, of course, Destination Imagination.

For those of you who don’t know, Destination Imagination is a non-profit organization that focuses on equipping kids with the skills they will need later in life, and helping build STEM skills. A more detailed explainationncan be found in the “About” section of their website.

Vision & Mission

Our Group

This was our second year of DI, so we were used to the process. We started by looking over the challenges for this year and picking teams. My team consisted of Sam, Amelia R, Alex, and Caleb. After getting into groups, we picked our challenges, and we ended up with out uncontested first choice, Scientific, AKA Medical Mystery. Here’s a helpful video explaining the rules of our challenge and what we’re trying to achieve.

Now, I could go on and on about our solution, and I will, but for you, the audience’s sake, I’ll try to keep it short to save room for my reflection. I’ll be splitting it into four parts, one for each aspect of our challenge. Ok. Let’s begin.

Story

For the story, we first had to pick our disease. We originally wanted to make up a disease (which we aptly named D.E.A.T.H), but after some help from our teacher, we decided to pick a real disease. Lucky for us, this disease, musical hallucinations, ended up being the basis of our team choice element.

After the disease was decided, we wrote our story. The basis of our story was:

Mee, the patient, (played by Sam), was on vacation in Costa Rica with friends Meme (Amelia) And Moses (Caleb) when they go to a bar and order potent cocktails from Bartender Martin (Alex). They wake up to Mee having musical hallucinations. He is taken to Dr. Martin (Alex again) and are informed he has musical hallucinations. They do not take it seriously, and go on a tour led by Mr. Martin (Alex, again). The get lost but somehow find the witch doctor (Jason)’s hut in the forest. The witch doctor shows a model of the disease and the effects in the human head, and guides them to a temple. Here, they find medicine (antidepressants) and leave. They go home.

This story went through multiple revisions, but this is the final product. Well, until provincials I guess.

However, we also needed to create a backdrop. We started with a complicated rotating backdrop, but quickly realized that was too complicated, so we made a simple wooden frame and two large sheets of paper with a room drawn on one, and a forest drawn on another. Sorry for the lack of pictures, we don’t realky have any. You’ll get to see the backdrop and story in the performance.

Sympt-O-Matic

The Sympt-O-Matic was another important part of our challenge. It involved creating a model using technical methods to show the effects of the disease on a human patient. For us, our disease mostly affected parts of the head, so the Sympt-O-Matic was a human skull.

The plans started out as putting a petestal inside a papier-mache skull, with a tissue paper brain and lights lighting it up. However, we forgot all about the petestal, so we made a new design. The new design consisted of the skull, split in half, with paper lining the sides with drawings of the parts of the brain and ear with lights on the inside. This design worked out pretty well.

Double Vision

Double Vision was the third main aspect of our challenge. It was called, as you can see from the title, Double Vision. This was the… how do I say this…. most difficult to understand aspect.

This featured one scene in any part of the performance that is shown in “double vision”, which involves showing a scene in two different perspectives. That’s it. Very…. interpretive.

Our double vision went through many stages, like a metamorphosis. It began as a simple hallucination, as our disease had been made up. After changing our disease to musical hallucinations, it turned into a scene in which Dr. Martin explains the effects of musical hallucinations in two ways, with Mee on one side and a regular patient on the other side. Don’t understand? Me neither. To this day, I still have no idea what that whole thing was about.

qimono /pixabay

Eventually, we figured out it didn’t have to be about the disease. It could actually be about some part of the story, so we decided to separate the stage, and have Mr. Martin the tour guide getting separated from the group and the perspectives of each party.

Team Choice Elements

If you’ve read my last DI post, you know what these are, but I’ll explain it anyways. Team choice elements are meant to show off your team members’ skills and abilities. You use two of these in your presentation.

Our first team choice element revolved around ya boi’s MAD oboe skillz. Sorry about that. But, it’s pretty obvious where this came into place. Musical hallucinations? Oboe? Music?

Spoiler, we used the oboe music as sound effects for musical hallucinations.

Our second team choice element was costume design, or more specifically, face painting. This came into play during the creation of the witch doctor. The witch doctor’s costume consisted of me, dressed in big ol’ black robes, with a big ol’ skull painted on my face.

Yeah sure, I looked like the grim reaper, but it was all good, as it really helped establish the witch doctor’s “mysterious vibe”. Unfortunately, I forgot to take photos of the process, so you’ll have to watch the video of our performance to see the witch doctor in all of his magical glory,

The Performance

So, DI came pretty quick, and before you could say Musical Hallucinations, DI was at our school and our performance was in 3 hours. There weren’t many things to do on the day, except rehearse lines. Then, we got ready in the prep area and we got ready to perform. Here’s the performance.

Reflection

My DI experience this year has taught me a lot.

During the main building process, communication was crucial, and that wasn’t something I think we really excelled at. We rarely communicated, and that led to us never actually meeting up. So, we split up the work, which ended in disaster, as a lot of our jobs were two-people jobs.

This lack of communication also led to a lot of procrastination. Not good. We ended up leaving our Sympt-O-Matic’s finishing touches, the backdrop, and a lot more to the last minute, ending up in a lot of stress.

However, DI also taught me a lot about medicine, such as parts of the brain, ear, and what each of those parts do. I also learned about mental disorders, and how antidepressants have many, many usages. DI also taught me about cooperation, as we were able to work together in the last minute to pull everything together.

This, of course, isn’t the final DI post. Beware, provincials is coming.

This is Jason, signing off.