”Emerson, don’t forget your lines! Nik, remember to bring the prop! Anika, we need the costume for tomorrow,” and finally, we can relax…for now…

DI regionals is finally over and the hard work has paid off. With an unexpected 2nd place win, K-NEAT is ready to take on Provincials! Now, it’s time to reflect and rewind the story a bit.

Lets start this blog off from the very beginning of the DI process: choosing teams and our challenge for the year. Each of us in PLP were given a form to complete saying who we’d like to potentially work with for DI. From there, the teams were made and it was time to choose our challenge we’d like to compete in. Nik, Taylor, Emerson, Anika and I decided to go with this year’s engineering challenge, Monster Effects. Basically, we had to work as a team to create a structure which would then have weights dropped on it. A special effect also had to be integrated and triggered by the structure to enhance the Monster in our story. The story would then have to be about a Monster with an unexpected result. The Monster could be of any gender, appearance, real or imaginary and have any kind of personality. Want to learn more about the challenge? Check out this short cheesy video!

Knowing all this, it was time to get brainstorming. To better understand the challenge, our team, K-NEAT had to fill out a number of forms and read a long handbook to know our challenge and it’s rules inside and out. These forms included brainstorming to help our team with ideas for creating our solution. My team and I threw out ideas for the structure, team Choice elements, story and more! Together, we narrowed it down and started to define some ideas.

Since I did this challenge last year, I already had a pretty good idea of how we could make the structure both light and strong. The structure specifications said that our structure had to be within 7.5-9 inches tall and could weigh no more than 175g. To make the structure light, I took a visit to the hardware store and looked around for some kind of wood that appeared strong yet light. It took a lot of feeling around since there were like a thousand different shapes, cuts and types of wood at the store. To make the structure strong, my team and I decided to assemble the unit with gorilla glue and place some of the wood in the shape of triangles since that’s the strongest shape.

So now we have the structure built which I guess is the Center of our overall challenge, but there was still so much left to do in the creation process. I mean, what’s a DI presentation without a story? After reading the lengthy encyclopedia about our challenge, we knew that we had to create a story about a monster that had an unexpected impact or ending. This story would then be presented in front of the appraisers on the day of the tournament. Now, speaking of a monster, our team assumed that most other teams would create their story about the monster being scary and evil or the story would take place in space or wherever most people would think of when they think “monster”. So, Nik and I worked closely to write the story script. We thought about it a lot and realized that there aren’t many love stories presented at DI. This would make our presentation unique from the others. After all, how many stories do you know about a monster falling in love? Ok, true. Most of the time, I’m totally disgusted by love but I thought that adapting the popular Beauty and the Beast story would be a great asset to our challenge solution! So yes, we rewrote the Beauty and the Beast story to make it our own! Click the link below to see!

Besides just writing a story, we also had to make props, backdrops and costumes to really bring the tale to life. To do this quickly and efficiently, we divided the tasks up. Taylor was responsible for designing the props, I was in charge of creating the Firebird costume for our monster and Nik, Emerson and Anika created the frame and painted the backdrop. Bam! Pure teamwork!

Ok, I’m sure you’re wanting to hear what happened on the day of the tournament so let’s cover this last prep topic quickly: the special effect. Yup, that’s where we struggled and went wrong. Originally, my team and I had a working special effect that triggered a fan to blow paper out of our volcano prop. Unfortunately, we found out that it didn’t meet the specifications needed to compete. Therefore, my team and I had to restart this part of the challenge. Emerson created a circuit which set off a motor to turn on the fan. “Yay”, we thought! Everything was going so well…or so we thought…

It was finally the day of the tournament and my team and I were doing the final touches on our props and costumes and reminding each other of last minute changes and lines. Emerson and Nik were in a separate room to finish up the special effect circuit. And, this is where it all went wrong. The rest of the team, including myself joined the boys in the room to help them out and we realized that our battery for the circuit was left on overnight and was now dead. My team searched the whole school for another battery but there were none to be found. We came to the conclusion that we would just have to manually trigger the effect.

The disasters just continued to arise from there. As my team and I lined up for  our structure check in, we realized that we had to have a sample of every single one of the materials we used to build it. Fortunately, we were able to find a sample of all our materials except for our glue. This almost got our structure disqualified but, luckily, the lady running the challenge was kind enough to let us compete with our structure and let us off with a warning for provincials.

So far so good. I mean, we got through all the pre testing without losing too many points. It was now time to hand in our forms and compete. However, as the woman at the desk checked us in and asked for our forms, my team and I realized that we were missing many of our forms that needed to be filled out and completed prior to the tournament. Big oops. So, what did we do? Well, while Emerson and Anika brought our stuff into the presentation room, Nik and I had to stay behind and hand write many of the forms in messy scribbles.

Ok so we got through all the prep work leading up to this moment. K-NEAT FINALLY was ready to compete and stepped out onto the stage to perform their challenge solution. The performance…didn’t go as planned and wasn’t as good as our dress rehearsals in class. However, we still got through it and landed an unexpected 2nd place win! Yay K-NEAT!

Time to reflect. Our instant challenge went wonderfully and my team and I scored max points! But our central challenge, well, there were quite a few things that went well, but tons of things that went wrong. Luckily our team was great at improv because many things were forgotten during our performance such as playing the music for our team Choice elements meaning that Anika had to sing without music and I had to dance without any sound. Fortunately, most people didn’t even notice that there was supposed to be music in those areas of the play. Emerson also never said any of his lines and I started the intro line way too early. Both of those are an easy fix for provincials. The Firebird costume definitely needs improvement which, again, easy fix. The biggest thing our team needed to work on was our special effect. On the day of the tournament, it didn’t even go off meaning we got minimal points for that category for scoring.

Overall, I’m happy with how we did. On the day of the tournament, our teamwork was really tested but we pulled through and were there for one another. We all know what we did well and what needs to change or be fixed, so, over Spring Break, K-NEAT plans to work hard and, before we know it, it’ll be DI Di all over again.

Have you ever heard the term Like-Term? Haha got the pun there? Ok, moving on, I’m sure you’ve heard of algebra before. You know, the weird looking math equations with a mix of letters and numbers? Yeah that. But what the heck is a Like- Term? Well, before diving into the answer, I had no idea what it was either before starting this unit. I didn’t even know what a polynomial was. So, if you’ve been following along in my Scimatix adventure, you might know by now that before starting each project, we are required to create a project start mind map. And, because I knew nothing of this project, my mind map was nothing more than questions upon questions. Below, you can see that my original statements are in black and everything I learned is written in purple.

So yeah, I obviously didn’t know much. But, that’s ok because the point of school is to learn. Right? Let’s just quickly explain what a polynomial and like term is. Basically, a polynomial is like a group of algebraic equations such as r2. There are many forms of polynomials depending on the number of terms in each problem. So what is a like term? Like Terms are used to simplify polynomials. So if you had a number with the same variable(s), they are “alike” so you can put them together and create a simpler problem.

To summarize and show what we learned and our understanding for this unit, we were each paired up to create our own creative project to represent polynomials and like Terms. Unfortunately for me, I was left to do this project on my own so I decided to create an iMovie trailer. I included both charts to show my equations and used coloured blocks to show different variables and terms. The thing I really wanted to focus on for this project was creative thinking and innovative design. We had a lot of freedom in this project so we could create anything we wanted. I personally thought that doing an iMovie trailer would be both fun and unique! This was a great learning experience for me to work both independently and show off some of my video making skills.

Unfortunately, even with my hard work, my video was still a F.A.I.L. Now I’m not talking about a giant F on my assignment, but a F.A.I.L. in PLP simply stands for a First Attempt In Learning. Yes, Incompletely missed the mark for this assignment, but I still learned about polynomials and Like Terms. And so, to demonstrate this, I completed the last 4 pages of a workbook.

Although my Video didn’t work out as planned, I feel that I demonstrated the following curricular competencies: Reasoned and Analyzed the equation and used technical methods (iMovie and video apps) to complete my solution and present my project. I used apps on my iPad such as Keynote and iMovie to create a trailer and write out an equation. I also showed my understanding and solving abilities while completing the workbook pages. I may have screwed up my original project, but in the end, still proved that I learned something and showed my understanding of the polynomials concept.

So, that’s about it for this little post! Thanks for reading!

If you’re of a certain age or brought up during a certain time span, you’ve probably heard of the Travel Vlog icon, Rick Steves. If you’ve never heard of him, don’t even worry, before starting this project, I’ve never heard his name or seen his face before. Basically, Rick is a writer and travel video figure that many girls (like my humanities teacher) can’t keep their eyes off of. He is well known for his travel guide videos and his books to help visitors and tourists get the best out of their trip. Rick Steves was used as a major inspiration for this project. From his cheesy introduction sequence to his informative script, our goal was to make Rick proud. Or, in my words, PLP 9 vs Risk Steves.

So you might have guessed the project just by how I introduced the post. But for this assignment, each of us were asked to research and create a travel guide video about a historical site either in Victoria, Smithers or locally here in Vancouver. I was assigned the well known and visited Chinatown Vancouver where history and modern day meet. Like most projects, the teachers will ask us to reflect after and in this case, write a blog post!

While I’ve made countless films and videos in the past for other assignments, I’ve never really made a travel guide video before so this project was a great opportunity to learn a few new film techniques! To start the project off, we were required to do some research about our location before even thinking about hitting the “record” button. Now, before my teachers start bugging me about telling you what I learned, let’s dive right into it. I’m pretty sure I can call myself the Chinatown Vancouver expert by now 😂.

The story of Chinatown Vancouver, although very interesting doesn’t end in a happy ending. Chinatowns were originally created as almost a “hang out spot” for new Chinese settlers and immigrants alike. Think about it this way, if you went to a party but you only knew a few of the people who were there, you’d probably feel more comfortable hanging out with the people you know and get along with. Right? Well, it was no different for the Chinese. They were kinda the outsiders in BC so they created these towns or villages so they could all be together and still be able to celebrate and share traditional Chinese customs and beliefs. Vancouver’s Chinatown began to grow as more Chinese people were brought into the area during the construction of the CPR Railway. The place reached its peak in the early 1900s as during this time, Canada was more focused on the over population of Indian immigrants in the country. During its peak, Chinatown took up several blocks and featured many Chinese businesses such as theatres, restaurants, schools, libraries and basically anything else you have in your neighbourhood today! This however all took a turn when the country signed what is known as the Chinese Exclusion Act. A costly head tax was billed to any Chinese person wishing to immigrate to Canada in hopes of lowering the population of Chinese immigrants. So, going back to the party visual, imagine the other people at the party (not your friends) started being mean to you. This could be for whatever reason. Perhaps you tripped and everyone laughed at you or you didn’t wear fancy attire, justimagine that the other people there were being mean. But also imagine you going off to hang with your friends. They become a sort of escape from the other people. A sort of sanctuary. Well, during this hard time, Chinatowns also became a sort of sanctuary for the Chinese people too. It was a safe place where they could still be accepted no matter their race.

Anyways, regardless of the racist laws and head tax, the Chinese population in Canada continued to grow. However, Chinatown Vancouver never quite rebuilt its once thriving community and th e majority of its buildings were knocked down in order to create more housing.

Well that was whole ton of history for one day. Let’s cut to the chase, filming techniques and angles and all that cool stuff.

Doing a travel video isn’t as hard as one might think. Sure you see Rick Steves looking all smart and fancy as he casually walks through exotic streets and locations looking like a know-it-all. But really, it isn’t that different than other videos I’ve made in the past. One fairly similar video would be my Alberta Identity film about how land impacts identity. Both include info about certain places that are worth seeing in the area. The video also consists of many voiceovers, on location scenes and scenery shots to show the setting of the video.

This travel video has taught me much about different filming techniques such as how important it is to have a consistant audio throughout. Using a microphone or headset is extremely essential for good clear audio and voiceovers. I used this technique for my video and saw great improvement in the quality of my voice on camera!

Now this should be a no brainer especially when you see it with your own eyes, but camera angles can play a big role in how your film turns out. While on field studies, we’ve gotten pretty good at filming and capturing scenery angles and nature but, everyone in our class definitely needed work when it came to filming a person.

Part of this project was trying to learn and capture a person or object using the rule of thirds. This is a photography term used to try to get an angle that is visually appealing to the audience. To practice this, we partnered up in pairs and took both a closeup photo and another photo of our partner from a distance using the rule of thirds.

Besides learning different film techniques, I also learned to take leadership and learn how to direct people so that your instructions are clear and easy to follow. In a way, it’s like directing a movie. I had to learn how to be firm but kind, patient and specific when it came to giving directions. In the end, I ended up with a pretty cool video that showcases everything I’ve learned up to this point.

I’m extremely proud of how I was able to add in all the details and video making skills I’ve learned this year and be able to pour it all into what I think is one of my best videos yet!