Category Archives: Science/Math

Work that I did in science and math class.

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.

tPOLs

Helo again loyal readers. My name may or may not be Jason Guan, and this is my very official tPOL blog post. As you may know, I have a post currently on my blog called mPOLs (midterm presentation of learning) and now, this is my tPOL post (transitional presentation of learning). This will probably be very similar to my last post, as I will be talking about my work, ethics, and growth as a learner and how PLP has benefited my learning experience. You know. All that usual stuff.

Alright. Let’s get started by going through my PLP subjects (the classes, not like test subjects… although there were some of those as well.)

Oh Wait. My goal this post and in my tPOL is to answer the question: Why am I ready to move on to the next grade? So look out for points in which I try to answer that question.

Main Skills

The main skills in PLP 8 this year were presentations, still images and storytelling. In this section I’ll be talking about why I think that I have improved a lot at these skills that will be vital to Grade 9.

So, I think the project that taught me the most about still images was the Tempest Tableau. This was the  one project in which we really learned how to elevate and make still images tell a story without many animations. We were able to figure out how to tell one of Shakespeare’s works by using just a few poses and some backgrounds. I think the still images part really came from the backgrounds. We really learned what a background could do to influence a story since we weren’t really allowed to move, so the backdrops really had to tell the story.

Also, this was the origin to the “infamous” flaming beavers in our rendition of act IV. In the fur trading company. Yep. Get the connection?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oWCMY6vHVaM

Now, I think the project that taught me the most about storytelling was the feudalism quilt. We had to figure out how to use a still image to tell a story, while using one of my most hated art forms, abstract. *sigh* Anyways, I figured out how to tell a story well with just a still image.

Ah, Presenting. The project that really taught me well about presentations was the Exploration unit. We had  to act as crew members to famous explorers, make a comic, and present why we should be given funds for voyaging to not only our teachers, but also all of our peers. This really helped me with my public speaking and, most of all, trying not to talk unnecessarily fast. This might have been one of the most useful skills I learned, as I’ll probably need it for the rest of my life.

Humanities

Alright. On to my first subject. Good Ol’ Humanities. Humanities is probably the subject in which I learned the most. I had practically no idea what the heck the Feudal Ages were and why Portugal was so important in the Age Of Exploration, so let’s get into business.

Out of all the work I’ve done in Humanities this term, I feel especially proud of my advertisements in Oregon and Deep Cove. This isn’t because of how good my ads were. They were not good, to say the least. However (there’s always a however), this was really the main project that taught me some of the key PLP skills. First of all, it taught me how to use some apps that I would end up using for the rest of the year and probably further. It taught me how to use Pages, Notability, and an app I have mixed feelings about, Canva.

Also, I learned a huge skill that gets you MAJOR bonus points in PLP, revision. If you’re in PLP and you don’t know revision, watch out.

You can just see the difference between my first and last advertisements.

 

Yep. All revision right there. Now, on to the other side of the achievement spectrum, is the Renaissance. I feel as this wasn’t really the fault of me being bad, I’d think this was just a product of poor timing. This was right smack dab in the middle of DI (Destination Imagination). If you’ve either experienced it firsthand or read my posts, you’ll know what that was all about.

What a DI-Saster

Also, some of you may not know this, but this was around the time I had registered for the VYSO (Vancouver Youth Symphony Orchestra), which, if you don’t know, is a pretty big deal. I had registered late, so I was pretty behind. Luckily, there was not a lot of challenge as I play the oboe, which is probably played by 1 in 200 Kids in Vancouver.

Now, I’m usually not one for excuses, but I want to clarify that that was REALLY lousy timing. Anyways, I was kind of distracted for this unit, so I didn’t really pay that much attention, and that really came back to nip me later. My end project, the tryptich, was rushed, late, and seemed half-done. Not especially good.

 

I think that Humanities has really helped me develop the skills needed to “survive” in PLP. It taught me revision, how to use a variety of apps, and most importantly, to pay attention in class. As you can definitely see by my “excellent” tryptich. Now, onto a different subject.

Maker

alrighty. I think that I’ve had my biggest and most important projects in Maker. I’ve had DI (what a wild ride), and the 2 exhibitions. Those were quite the experience. I think it’s only fitting to first talk about the “horror’… Destination Imagination.

If you’ve read my crazy, incessant rants about DI, you’ll know why I have mixed feelings about it. In one hand, we did win regionals and 3rd in provincials, and yes, we had the chance to go to globals, but what did it take to get there? My sanity? My happiness? My emotional well being? Just kidding. Or am I?

Anyways, I think the main skill I learned from this whole thing was teamwork. We were all kids from different backgrounds, with different passions, and different work ethics. Fraser, Luciano, Kyle, and myself. This project kind of threw us together and basically forced us to work together. I think we all learned how to work together well, and especially how to work with kids that are CONSTANTLY TRAVELLING *cough* Kyle *cough*.

Then there were the exhibitions. Star Wars and Blue Sky. I’ll start with Star Wars. Of course, I’m sure you all know about the infamous posterboard. Yeah. Guan revision at its best. In case you didn’t know, I’ll give you a brief explanation.

So, my project for the Star Wars Exhibition was prosthetics. I had made a prosthetic hand model, which was pretty bad, but then there was my posterboard. Just look at this abomination.

Blech. Yuck. Dis-GUSTING. BUT… that day, I was roasted so hard that day that I was motivated to go home and make it not horrible. Now, look at this “masterpiece”.

Although I said I’d work on my time management in my mPOL, I still think it needs work. Also, I realized I had said the words “time management” around 1,000 times in my last mPOL, so I’d think I should probably find another goals. Time management was still a major issue in this project and it led to me having to rush many, many times through this project. Now, let’s move on to the final subject:

Scimathics

Ah, scimathics. I’d say scimathics is one of the least stressful classes. A: We get tons of time for each of our projects and B: We get pretty much entire classes to work on our projects. It’s pretty hard not to do good work in that kind of environment. But, still, I ended up hacking up not 1, but 2 projects in this class. Let’s go through my work in scimathics.

So, a unit I was pretty proud of was the first science project of the year, yes, the Massive Mighty Molecular Motion Movie (MMMMMovie). We used our time wisely, and we (I) also learned a very valuable skill: iMovie. Who do you mean by we, you say? Well, for this project, I worked with none other than the one, the only Mr. Emerson Chong. 

Now, onto the not-so-good stuff. First of all, Optics. Let me just say, the optics unit was NOT fun, at ALL. I did not understand a word of the unit. I did pretty good on the test though, but that’s probably the only good thing that came out of the unit. Also, I was an idiot and the biggest mistake that I probably made that unit was probably that I did not ask for help, so that was quite a lesson.

Now, a project that I had mixed feelings about was the Earthquake Playground project. On one side, we (Myself, Sam, Emerson, Jackson) did great. We did our presentation just as practiced and we only hacked up a couple of little parts. On the other side, we really had to work especially hard those last few days to get it all together, and, to add to that, right after Blie Sky, of course all of my group members were busy, so I ended up having to do an entire model on formit. Let me tell you, In our class, people don’t recognize formit  for being easy to use. It is absolutely not fun at all. And to have to make this in 1 night really sucks the energy out of you.

 Work Ethics and Improvements

I guess my work ethics this half of the year have really improved since the first 1 1/2 terms. Before, I’d sit around goofing off for half the time and I’d produce work that I wasn’t really proud of. Nowadays, I put a lot more effort into my work, as you can see from the 1 night model above and I feel I’ve significantly improved from my last mPOL. Even my mPOL wasn’t very good, and I’m pretty sure you could tell I winged it. I was not well rehearsed in the least and it did not turn out very well.

An area for improvement for me is probably also still work ethics and, wait for it, Time management. Blech. Even saying those words brings bad memories flooding into my mind. Ugh. Yuck. Even though I really hyped it up as something I’d improve throughout the year, I didn’t. Occasionally I’ll still get distracted by a notification or a message and produce low-quality work. That’s definitely something I’ll work on for next year. Maybe I’ll refer to it as just study habits or work ethics. That seems a lot better than throwing up in my mouth after sayignthe words time management again (a bit of am exaggeration).

I guess the main things I learned this year were kind of the basics of PLP. Critique, taking critique, revision, using apps, and paying attention in class. I do feel that I have successfully learned these lessons and skills through hard work and epic fails (the posterboard). I think that this has really helped me prepare for next year and the horrors of Grade 9 PLP.

Refrections and Reflactions

Bonjour mes amis. Je m’appelle Jason et c’est mon blog. Congratulations to you if you can figure that out without using google translate. Today, I’m going to talk about optics. Lights, lenses, mirror, and other stuff. Also, this is a science post! I think this might be my first science-related post and it’s about one of the most confusing topics I’ve learned this year. So, without further ado, here’s the first Science post ever on my blog.

First off, we started right at the end of our previous unit and attempted to prove why and how light and sound are waves. For this, my partner and I successfully proved how sound is a wave by talking about speakers and the sound waves emitted and picked up by the ears. Light, however, was a different story. We got pretty stuck on light, and all we were able to come up with was when you shine white light into a prism, it separates into colour beams. Yep. We were in for a looong ride.

Now, let’s talk ‘bout light. We then proceeded to watch a documentary about light and nature and cool stuff like that. Here’s the full video:

This documentary was kind of like an detailed introduction to the unit in a whole and helped us understand the unit.

Alright, now let’s have a little talk about mirrors. You know, The reflects thingys that are shiny. You know, you know… yeah. You’ve got your plane mirrors, your concave mirrors, and convex mirrors. And what better way to show off mirrors than with burning things.

Yep. We went outside, grabbed a cardboard chunk and a large concave mirror, and we burned the absolute heck out of it. Also, we also learnt about a solar furnace in France with enough heat and power to melt birds. Sad, but interesting.

This video, along with the mirror experiment really helped my understanding with mirrors and how powerful they can be if used properly. It also gave me a deathly fear of large, concave mirrors. Also, I showed this to my brother the other day, and now he’s scared of France. I’m not sure if he’s kidding or not, but I’m pretty sure he thinks if it can melt a bird, it can melt him.

After that, we watched a documentary about some guy going around the world looking at how the Islamic Golden Age impacted optics in the modern age. This was more about the origins of light, but was still pretty beneficial to watch. You can watch it for yourself right here.

This documentary shed some light on the origins of optics and also really helped us understand optics more. There’s a whole series of these documentaries by the same guy, so if you, my valuable viewer, are still interested about Science in the Islam golden age, you can go have a Golden Age Science marathon.

Some things that I found interesting were that although the Greeks are believed to have founded Optics, most of what we learn today came from a guy named Ibn al-Haytham in a period called the Golden Age Of Science (9th – 14th Century BCE). He pretty much challenged what the Greeks believed about light being emitted from the eyes and proved that light actually enters the eyes. So, when you think about it, he’s one of the real fathers of optics. Also, he wrote a book called the Kitab al-Manazir (The Book Of Optics) in an asylum after an angry Caliph (King) threw him in there after he faked being crazy to escape a promise he couldn’t keep. He was a pretty interesting guy, to say the least.

One of his most famous experiments was called the Camera Obscura, which was basically a pinhole camera. How it works is if you take a window with a view, black it and the entire room out, poke a hole in the window covering, and put some sort of screen behind it, the image will be perfectly reflected onto the screen, although it will be inverted. This experiment is also where the modern word camera comes from, as the Camera Obscura process is pretty much in everything that uses light, form modern photography to even sight. Here’s a diagram:

Of course, this is all in the video, so if you felt that I’m bad at explaining, or want to know how the Camera Obscura works, go check out the video above.

We didn’t really do much homework after that. We just listened to some lectures and did a couple of labs. My first lab was pretty basic. It was about mirrors and I worked on it with a certain Mr. Kyle Dandar. In this lab, we worked on some basic mirror stuff. We used a ray box and an optics kit and shined (shone?) light rays at different mirrors and marked down the incident rays and the reflected rays, which are the light rays shone at the mirror, and the ones reflecting off of the mirror. Pretty basic stuff, though still important. This pretty much acted as some of the foundation for the rest of our unit.

Ok. Now, onto the work that we did in school. We started by learning about Ray Diagrams.

A ray diagram is a diagram that shows rays. More specifically, the paths of rays that are shown at different mirrors and lenses. Also, the things you need to write down about a ray diagram follow one of the catchiest acronyms I’ve known in my life. Size, Attitude, Location, Type. SALT. Here are a few examples:

This was one of the biggest challenges I faced in this unit. And, even though I did not understand this at all,  and in all my panic, I forgot that there was a teacher in the room that knows more that I ever will, so, I was forced to go solo for most of this stuff.

Anyways, then we did our second lab, The BFLL (Big Fat Lenses Lab) which I did with Izzy. This one was about lenses and rays and cool stuff like that, as you can tell from the title. We looked at bi-concave and bi-convex lenses, and also how light behaves after being shown (shined? shone?) through different liquids (Water, Vegetable Oil, and Ethanol) and why we thought different liquids had different brightnesses of light rays. Here. Look at a few images.

For comparison, this lab was wayyyyyyy more extensive than the mirror one, but this one was also kore challenging, and therefore, I learned more knowledge. And, as we all know, knowledge is power.

Now onto our test. That’s right, no final project like in humanities, just a test to cap off our unit. And, I’m not going to lie, I did have to study quite a bit to do good on this test. Also, I had a ton of opportunities to get more practice in class with all the extra worksheets, and, like the overconfident naive child’s I am, I passed them up thinking I had my optics down mat. Unfortunately, I then proceeded to realize that it’s still optics and I knew nothing about optics. So, I studied. It was pretty hard having passed up all my opportunities, but I managed to get it done and wound up with a pretty good 21/23.

And that caps off my 1st ever science post. Wow. I’m just realizing that it’s over 1200 words. Good job to you for reading all of this. There might be more before the end of the school year, there might not. Be on the lookout for my next post about the wonders of exploration. And with that, I will leave you.

Wait, Wait, Wait, before I finish this post, I want you all to know, before you bombard me in the comment section, I know there’s a typo in my title. It’s intensional. I wanted to see how many people would actually notice it, well, now it’s not much of a secret anymore. Anyways, now, with that, I’ll really (finally) leave you.

mPOLs

Hello loyal readers. Today I will be talking about mPOLs. Presentations of Learning. These are basically student led conferences where we discuss our work for the term, our blog posts, and how we can improve our work. The main question for the mPOLs is: How am I going to progress as a learner? To help answer this question, I will be reflecting about my main PLP classes, Maker, Humanities, Math And Science.

So, my first discussion topic is humanities. Our first ever unit for Humanities 8 was, as you can probably remember, the wonderful world of advertising. I feel that my ads for both Deep Cove And Oregon could have been better. I feel that my knowledge of advertising has grown a lot with this unit. My evidence for this is my advertising blog post.

The Advertising Project Of DOOM

Then, for worldview and religion, I also feel that I could have done better work. My Explain Everything was OK, but I think our infographic was pretty good. I think the thing that I want to work on the most for Humanities is to improve my study habits and time management. My evidence for this unit is my Religion and Worldview blog post.

Religions and Such

Okay. Now let’s move on to Maker. In Maker, I feel that my work has been pretty good. My growth mindset studies and my selfie project were both pretty good. I have learned a lot of information about growth mindset and I feel it has helped me develop a better growth mindset. The main problem for this unit was, as you can probably tell, time management. Some of my assignments were late, and my goal this term is for my assignments to be on time.

My Mindset And Me

Then, we did the big Star Wars Exhibition. I think that my exhibition project went pretty well. The big issue for me was definately time management. I feel that I could have used my time for the Exhibition much better. Overall, I think that I had a pretty nice, open-ended question and a newly discovered knowledge of prosthetics.

It’s a trap!

Now, onto math. I feel that I did pretty well in Math this year. My test and schoolwork have been pretty good and I have handed in my work on time. I think that our group did pretty well for our door surface area project and we both worked well together and we did a pretty good job handling anything that came our way. I think my main issue for math was that I rushed through some of the work. My goal for math is to spend more time thinking about my work and to go through it slowly instead of rushing.

My door is a bore no more

I think that my study habits were a little slow. My homework took pretty long and some assignments were late. The assignments were pretty good quality, but I think my main problem is speed and time management. To achieve this goal, I will give myself more time to do schoolwork and document all of my assignments for the day.

I think my revision has been pretty good. I have taken all of my critique constructively, and I have used it to make my work a lot better. My teamwork has also been pretty good for the past term. I have been pretty responsible in my groups and I have been working well with others.

Overall, my main issue in the past term is definately time management and getting my assignments in on time. I feel that I can improve my study habits by giving myself more time for homework and using my school time wiser. My main question for how I can improve myself is: What can I do to make sure all of my assignments get handed in on time?

My door is a bore no more

Hello fellow humans. This post is going to be about something I feel I don’t really write about in this blog. That’s right, it’s everyone’s favourite subject, Math.

Ok, so our first big project for math was a project that has to do with surface area. We were tasked with increasing the surface area of this door by 5.

I was put into a group with Izzy, Ben, and Kiera. What we did was we made a ton of rectangular prisms to increase the surface area by five. Here are our calculations.

We first decided to shrink them by half to save paper. Bad idea. That ended up messing up all of our calculations. After that colossal mess up, we had to start all over again and make all new, full size rectangular prisms. The end result ended up looking like this.

As you can tell, our groups’ stuff was the direct middle of the door. I personally think it looks pretty good. Welp. That’s it. See ya soon.