Hello! And welcome to my first blog post of grade 9!! In this post I will be covering what I learned and accomplished over the past 4 days (yes, believe it or not, this project was completed in less that 4 days). I hope you enjoy!! Also, please check out my group member’s blogs here!
Nya, Raymond, and Dries!!

To kick off this project, we made an introduction video for ourselves. Personally, I don’t think I made a great video to meet the criteria. I think this because I didn’t fully grasp the purpose of the assignment and never asked someone to clarify what I didn’t understand.
I think that the overall purpose of this first milestone was to show us what video skills we would need to fully recreate the short film and help us improve on them at the same time.

The next thing I want to talk about is milestone 3. This one was important because it was the first draft of our recreation of the short horror film “RUN!”. This was the crash course that would allow us to properly create a second draft that could actually be compared to the original. For my group’s, the timing was off, the sound effects didn’t match volume and timing, we weren’t wearing the right colours, and we were even missing some camera angles! However, having all this FAILure (First Attempt In Learning) let us identify those mistakes and fix them in our second draft.
Unfortunately we didn’t upload the first draft to youtube so there’s no way to embed it here (thank goodness) so you can watch the original to compare it to my groups final video later.

Now, onto the bread and butter!! The final milestone of this project… The final draft of our recreation! After the first draft flopped, we looked at all that went wrong and right, and lets be honest, there was next to nothing done right. But we recognized that and decided to use our newfound skills to start over and make it much better! And so we reassigned our character roles and I became the main actor 😅. We found a new area to film our scenes, and thought out our whole thing on a wider scale. This time, we knew we needed as close a costume as possible, so we used masking tape on my grey sweater to add the striped seen in the original. We even made sure there was a small know on our log to slightly obstruct my hand! Overall, the second draft was miles better than the first (with a few mistakes nonetheless), and I’m certain that that’s the way it should have been. There’s not much else to say, so lets watch our “RUN!”!

Now its time for the competencies or should I say competency

Innovative Designer: this competency is based on how you made your solution to the problem or process. I think that I showed proficiency at this competency by collaborating on a (mostly) successful product through the use of trial and error and teamwork.

i hope you enjoyed the first blog post of my grade 9 year!!

until next time!

Hello, and welcome to my post about our latest scimatics project: The Ultimate Road Trip! This project was about designing a road trip and calculating its cost with a budget of $10,000.

Milestone 1: This milestone was a bit different than other scimatics project because it wasn’t the usual mind map. This milestone was the choice of car and its cost. I chose a Tesla Model X for $271 a day.

Milestone 2: Milestone 2 was just some generic math practice. Nothing more to say about it really

Milestone 3: Milestone 3 was a quiz to ensure that we learned what we needed from the previous milestone.

Milestone 4: This was our final cost and a spreadsheet with the math to calculate it. We needed to calculate daily and one time expenses.

This was my budget chart. I added some snacks for the drive.

Milestone 5: In milestone 5, we made the equation to calculate total cost, a map of the route we were taking, and a graph of the costs per day.

My equation was y=721x+4612 (y is total cost, and x represents days past.)

This was the route I was to take. I went from london all the way to Rome!

And here is my graph. The number on the bottom is days past, and on the side is cost.

Competency time!!

Reasoning and Analyzing: This competency is about making sure that all of your estimates were reasonable. I think that I did pretty good at this one and didn’t make too many estimates or assumptions in the first place.

Connecting and Reflecting: This competency was focused on seeing that we have connected math to whatever we’ve done on the road trip. I think that I showed this in my budget chart and that that’s a good example.

Communicating and Representing: This competency was based on showing equations with concrete evidence behind me. I think that I showed this in the budget chart and graph.

Thanks for reading my newest blog post! Bye!!

This is a post about our most recent maker project. It was called witness to history, and was about showing an aspect of our current lives with photos. I’ll be skimming over most of this project because it was all mostly focused on the product itself.

Milestones 1-4: these milestones were all to get us ready to take our photo essay, for example milestone 4, the storyboard. This was meant to be a rough idea of where the and how the photos and their respective angles would be.

Here’s my storyboard (sorry for the messy writing)

Now for the real photo essay. This was where all the work we’ve done so far went to.

Hello everyone! Today ill be telling you all about our most recent project. This one was a “joint” project between scimatics and humanities. Anyway, let’s get into this!

Humanities 1: this will be humanities milestone one. I will be swapping between the two so don’t get confused. This milestone was based off of an animated movie we watched Called Osmosis Jones. We watched the movie, then we would write down the plot of the movie using a storyboard. We would then reflect on how that story was similar to our current situation.

Here was my storyboard and paragraph.

Scimatics 1: As always, we started our new scimatics project with a mind map. This one was about cells and diseases and the questions we had about them.

Here’s my mind map!

Humanities 2: In this milestone, we read some comic books and analyzed them through a pre-made chart. I read a Darth Vader comic as well as a Black Panther comic.

Here’s the chart I made for the Black Panther comic. 

Scimatics 2: This was a particularly fun milestone. Because I got to use a photo editing app! In this milestone we made a wanted poster for the disease that we chose. It was supposed to look just like a real old western wanted poster.

This was my wanted poster!

Humanities 3: In this milestone our driving question for humanities finally came to make sense. it was “what was/is the significance of global exploration”. This was important now because we would finally choose an explorer from around 1400-1600. We also did some research on them and their life.

This is a piece of the research that we did on the explorer that we chose. I chose Juan Ponce de Leon

Scimatics 3: This milestone was simply a test to make sure that we were learning about cells and diseases. It was a khan academy test. Not much else to say.

Milestone 4: No, it’s not a typo, I meant to type milestone 4, this was because this was the beginning of where the two projects came together. This was the storyboard for our own comic book!

This is the first page of the storyboard (it’s pretty long).

Humanities 5: That’s the comic book! This was the product of all the research we’ve done up the this point. Where we put the knowledge we gained from this and put all of it into a comic book based on <explorer> who gets infected by or affected by <disease>.

Juan Ponce de Leon’s Misfortune

Theres the comic! You might have to download it though.

Competencies!

Humanities

—————

Establish historical significance: This competency is based on defining what is a “feat worth remembering” this is basically saying “what is significant enough to remember”. I think that I highlighted the important pieces of information about Juan Ponce de Leon with my comic book and showed his achievements in an entertaining way.

Connect: This competency was all about understanding how I, and others one

Scimatics

—————

Questioning and Predicting: This competency was focused on being personally interested about the subject at hand. I think that I was, to an extent, doing extra research for my own curiosity.

Scientific Communication: This competency was for communication of how well you show the real scientific interactions using the proper terms. I think that I definitely could have done a better job with adding more scientific interaction and used more scientific language.

Evaluating: This final competency was based off of an understanding and appreciating the evidence given. I think that I have shown this by creating a fun experience to show what my research has yielded.

I hope that you enjoyed my blog post on my latest project!

Bye!

With the recent event unfolding, a lot of confusion occurred. This definitely affected everyone immediately, one of those thing affected was D.I.. When D.I. Was cancelled we were definitely wondering what was going to happen from then on. Our teachers decided the show mist go on! No matter the circumstances this was going to happen. With this all happening we had to improvise.

Here was the plan: (please refer to my D.I. Regionals post before you read this post) we would change our entire presentation to help incorporate the online camera aspect. We did this by using the virtual background that zoom provides. We could change the setting easily, and that helped us lots. The only problem that was a large issue was the bridge. In the circumstances we had we had to change lots of the rules. This wasn’t an issue though, because this wasn’t the D.I. tournament we were expecting. Unfortunately I don’t have any images or footage to use because we didn’t think of recording the zoom call. But we changed the story to have us in a sort of competition to create a setting where collaboration in person wasn’t something we required. We did this by having each person making a bridge and our group continuing on with our “three little pigs” vibe. The first bridge was too weak and very light, the second bring too heavy and very strong, and the third being a good balance of light and strong. We tried to use bits and pieces of the children’s story to make our story a little less full of holes.

I hope you enjoyed my reflection on that very new experience! Stay strong!

-Keenan

Hey! Welcome to another post on my blog! I hope you read all the way to the end of this one too! Enjoy!

This post is based off of our latest project in scimatics; The “Ultimate Design Challenge” this “challenge” was a project where we were to create a 3D design (and print it) in the app Tinkercad™ of course, we were allowed to use other design apps as long as it was possible to find SA (surface area) and V (volume).

Anyway, on to the actual project

Milestone 1: milestone 1 was a chance to think about what we really wanted to design, well what we might design anyway. When I made my “driving question”” as we call it, I thought that I would design a goalie glove for soccer, however, I did end up doing it because it has too many hard calculations.

Milestone 2: this milestone was or once we had decided what we would finally make. I decided to make a wine glass for maximum volume. I chose this one because I thought it would be cool to design something like a cup.

These are the formulas for SA and V for all of the shapes I had at the time

Milestone 3: milestone 3 was the final calculations and measurements for our 3D model. Mine actually had more SA than V which was not my goal.

Here are my final calculations!

Milestone 4: milestone 4 was the final model. We had it sent into our teacher (Mr. Hughes) to be 3D printed at school. Unfortunately for me, my print didn’t work and I had to do without it.

This is a photo of my final model in the app I created it in! Shapr3D!

Milestone 5: milestone 5 was our presentation to the class. This presentation was supposed to include our printed model but only one group had it. My presentation in general was a flop. I didn’t have anything prepared and I think that I can improve on that in the future.

Competency time!

Applying and innovating: this one was based around using your time efficiently and working well. I think that I mostly did this well even though I had some distractions in class.

Reasoning and analyzing: this competency was meant to show how well you can show math in an efficient and convincing way while having it make sense. I think that in my calculations and formulas I showed this well because it shows the numbers in an open are for simplicity.

Communicating and representing: thins competency was pretty simple. It was to show what you know about your calculations and providing proof of them for evidence. Although I didn’t do a good job at this during my presentation, I think that I did have the calculations and formulas in an easy-to-read concept.

until next time!

Keenan