Today I will be reflecting on my most recent project called “Rise of the Frankenstuffies.” This project was all about story telling, and the industrial Revolution. This seems like something normal to have as a project, right? Well it would be if that was all we had to do for this project but instead of just writing a boring story of the Industrial Revolution, we added a twist to it. For the story you had to have a character that you made using stuffed animals. In class we cut them up and would trade for different parts and then you would sew them together to make a Frankensuffie. For this part I learned a lot about the different ways to be creative when telling the story of a fictional character. I loved creating the character and making a profile describing its characteristics and personality. My character’s name was Ralph, he was born 437 years ago, and lives at NASA space station in Florida.
The next big thing we did in the project was write our short story about our character. I learned a lot from this part because of the way that we took a bunch of different events that were seen as historically significant and we were able to change them to fit our story. Here is my story:
I learned all about different things that changed the way our society works today. One of the things that I found most interesting about the Industrial Revolution was that if it were not for this revolution we could have not switched over to electricity and we would have been using steam to this day. How different our world would be. This brings me to the driving question of our project which is “How do revolutions transform the world?” I think that revolutions transform the world by fundamentally changing the beliefs and ideas that our life is based on through expansion and travel.
After we wrote the short story we were tasked with making a film based on our short stories and the feedback that we got on them. I learned a lot of things from this stage. I learned a lot about the different ways that films get planned out and made. For example, we made a screenplay to show the way that our film would play out. We also made a storyboard to explain the different shots and the plot and actions of our story before we filmed it. I think I did a good job with making them because of the way that I showed the different causes and consequences in my film. In my story there is a part when Ralph is flying the first draft of his flying machine, and the engine sputters and he crashes his machine. Here is the screenplay and storyboard I made before filming my final video
The final stage of this project was making the film of our short story here is what I made.
Today I will be writing a blog post on the latest project that we have finished in class called Storm the Barricades! In this project our driving question was “How do revolutions transform societies?” This project was all about revolutions. We started off the project with learning about Crane Brinton’s theory of the “anatomy of a revolution”. In this part we took notes on how revolutions work and how Crane Brinton compares a revolution to a fever or illness. When we were learning it was easy to remember the different stages because of the way the theory related to things that we learned about last year about diseases. One twist that we had with this project was that we had 4 groups that we would do work with, instead of just one group or by ourselves. Each group was called a direction so there were North, South, East, and West groups. Each of these groups had a different job in the entirety of the project. The main group that made most of the stuff throughout the project was my North group. In this group there were 4 people: me, Raymond, Annie and, Ethan. This group was responsible for doing most of the building for the project. Another really important group was our East group, this group was our video/history/creative skills group. The next group that we had was our South group and this group was responsible for our book that we were reading in class called Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. The final group was our West group which was our writing and critique group.
Now that I have explained the structure of the groups, I will talk about the different parts of this project. In the first big part we had to make a Rube Goldberg machine that would represent the different stages of a revolution following Crane Brinton’s Theory. for this part we had to use metaphors to show the different stages. Here is the video we made of our machine:
The next part of our project was to make modifications to adapt and make metaphors for the machine to represent the American Revolution. The change that we made to our machine was adding a white house at the very end that a marble would role into to represent the final stage of a revolution which is where there is a new leader and everything goes back to near normal. We also made a few changes with how we decorated our machine to represent the American Revolution more, such as how on the bucket there is an American flag and when the ball rolls down the American flag unrolls. We made a video to show off this part of our machine. Here is a video of our American Revolution machine:
After this we had to write a paragraph explaining the historical significance of the American Revolution the paragraph that I wrote.
In the next segment of our project we adapted our machines to fit the French Revolution. For our modification on this machine we decided to add an extra ramp, and made it so that the bucket falling down would act as a guillotine to cut off the kings head. We also decorated to make it look French with flags and such. Here is the video that we made to show off the machine we built:
Then in the next part of the project we had to make a story with our machine and some other apps, mainly Puppet Pals. The idea of this part was for us to show a few different ways that societies are transformed by revolutions and what it would be like to be a French citizen in the French Revolution. My team and I started to brain storm and we came up with a character named Joseph who lived on a farm. Here is the final video that me and my team made:
Now that I have gone over everything we did in the project, I will answer the driving question “How do revolutions transform societies?” I think that revolutions transform societies in many ways that can be grouped into political, social and economic changes. Politically societies get transformed from a change in power and the structure of the government. A discontent with the ruler at the start of the revolution is usually one of the main causes of the revolution. For the French Revolution the political change was from a country ruled by monarchy and nobles to a republic. The social part of transformation results in people get to choose what happens more, the common people gain more power and control, and the important ideas and ideals of the society are solidified. An example of this from the American Revolution is the birth of a new country with its own identity. Economically, societies get transformed as the expense of items and the value of resources changes. At the end of the French Revolution, price and wage controls were lifted, and trade in the market was restored. Goods made to the market and a degree of prosperity was restored.
Now I will reflect on the core competencies of this project:
Creative Communicator: How might I use technology to create and communicate?
I believe that I demonstrated this competency when I was making a story in Puppet Pals. I think that I communicated my ideas well with this story presentation.
Designing texts: Have I used writing and design processes to plan, develop, create, and refine engaging and meaningful texts considering purpose, audience, and message?
I feel that I met this while writing the paragraphs about both the French and American Revolutions. I feel that I showed it well specifically when I provided supporting evidence for my paragraphs.
Discussing, Listening, and Speaking: have I respectfully exchanged diverse ideas and viewpoints to build shared understanding and extend thinking using appropriate speaking and listening skills for the context and purpose?
I feel I showed this when I was brainstorming with my peers about what we needed to do next with our machine and making storyboards.
Establishing Historical Significance: How do we make choices about what is worth remembering?
I feel I showed this with my paragraph about the American revolution as I feel that I did a good job showing what it means for an event to be significant.
Analyze Cause and Consequence: Who or what influenced events to occur and what were the consequences of those events?
I feel that I showed this well in my French Revolution paragraph as I feel I did a good job with making sure I explained what caused the events to happen and the consequences.
Today I will be reflecting on my most recent project in my maker class. This was probably one of my quickest projects that I have ever done. From start to finish the project was completed in about 3 days with only 4 hours on one day making one horror short film. The horror film that we recreated called “RUN!”. Now I will show the steps of the project and how I completed them.
In the first stage of this project we had to introduce ourselves in a creative way with a video using the Clips app. In my video I chose to introduce myself using one of my favourite sports, golf. Here is my video:
The next thing that we did was analyze the film “RUN!” with the group that we were assigned. My group had 4 other people in it, Simon, Josh, Indira, Ryan. We established our roles in the film, editing and sound. Next, we planned out the different shots of the film and established what the story was. We did this by making a story mountain about the different events in the film. We also had to find a location for shooting the film, and plan out costumes recreate the characters in the film. Here is the story mountain:
The next step was to start filming our rough draft. Here is what our rough draft looks like:
For our team’s rough draft of the film, I feel we did a decent job of remaking the film. A few of the things that we needed to change include the location, the smoothness of transitions and the feel of the movie. We also needed to work on things like costumes to get them exact, mainly for the jogger in the video. The reason we needed to change the location was because we couldn’t find a good log to use for the last part when the jogger hides behind the log. We found a completely different location for that part of it. We needed to change the smoothness of the transitions because the actual video looked very choppy and not very natural.
After we were done this we presented it too our class so that our peers could tell us what we could do to change up the movie to make it match the actual film better. We combined our own critique of our work with the feedback from our peers and made a much better film which looked like this:
Now I will reflect on the competency for this project:
Innovative Designer: How might I design a solution to a problem, process, or challenge?
I demonstrated this competency by making a remake of the horror short film “RUN!” as close to the original as I could by making costumes, acting out a character and editing part of the film.
Hello again! This is going to be my last blog post for my grade 8 year. Today I’m going to be talking about our final project, our Blue Sky project, that we present at the Spring Exhibition. A Blue Sky project is a special project where we address an issue and try to solve it using the LAUNCH process. LAUNCH stands for Listen and learn, Ask tons of questions, Understand the problem, Navigate ideas, Create a prototype, Highlight and Fix. Here is a video that explains the process:
This year we were challenged to frame our problem and solution using one of the UN sustainable goals and the COVID-19 pandemic. We were supposed to identify a real need and make a prototype to address this need. For my UN Sustainability Goal I chose number 6, which is clean water and sanitation. My inspiration for my prototype came from my Mom, who told me that the local breweries were making hand sanitizer in large buckets and had donated some to the hospital for the staff. When I heard this I thought about how my community doesn’t have hand sanitizer outside of shops for customers to clean their hands before they go into the store and touch products on the shelf. I realized that this could be extended to the UN goal for sanitation in areas where there isn’t clean water for washing hands. If I could come up with a product that could use the large containers of hand sanitizer being made by the breweries, this product could also be used in other areas to supply large amounts of hand sanitizer. The breweries make their sanitizer from a waste by-product of the brewing process, so it is inexpensive for them to make in large amounts and would reuse an otherwise unused by-product.
Here is my LAUNCH Journal that shows how I went from this idea to my final prototype of a large hand sanitizer dispenser.
I’m glad I can show my project in this post because we didn’t all get to show our projects at the Exhibition. For the Spring Exhibition, usually we would be grouped in a room with other students from Grades 8-10 who’s projects were similar to ours. Our room would have a theme and a story to guide visitors through the room to all the different projects, and we would interact with the visitors when they came to see our prototype. But as for most things since COVID, this Spring Exhibition was the same but different.
We were divided into groups of students with similar or compatible UN Sustainability Goals and each group of students was going to have a room. The room was a Zoom room though. We had to come up with a story for our room and a way to interact with the audience and present some of our projects, but we only had 10 minutes to do our presentation before the audience would be moved to another group’s room for their 10 minute presentation.
Our group was the Water group because we had projects from Goal 6 Clean Water and Sanitation, and Goal 14 Life Below Water.Most of the people in my group were Life Below Water so we came up with a story that talked about how the ocean is being polluted and after each person spoke, we put more objects in a jar full of water that represented the ocean. By the end of our presentation, the water in the jar had gone down, and the number of plastic objects in the jar had gone up. We all had an underwater scene as our backdrop, and were wearing goggles or dive masks. I think our presentation went pretty well.All of the groups had different backgrounds, stories, and ways of interacting with the audience. It was a pretty good presentation overall.
Now I will reflect on the competencies for this project.
Research and Understand: How might I research and understand a problem, process, or challenge using different perspectives? I met this competency when I came up with my original idea to use a bucket as the container for the hand sanitizer. I realized that if I was a store owner, I would not want to spend a lot of money on a fancy container so if I could develop something that could use the original bucket the breweries were using to hold the sanitizer, it would be more cost effective. I also met this when I explored different ways of dispensing hand sanitizer from the container as I had to overcome the challenge of how to get the right amount of liquid sanitizer out of the container without dispensing too much that would be wasteful, expensive and make a mess. That’s when I came up with the idea of a spray nozzle.
Take Creative Risks: How might I use technology to create in new ways? I met this competency when I used Minecraft to make my first couple of prototypes for the container. Looking at these prototypes helped me to see some flaws in my design, like the container on its side wouldn’t allow for all of the hand sanitizer to be used up. My second Minecraft design allowed me to come up with the upright container using a spray nozzle to pull the liquid up, using all of the hand sanitizer.
Revise: How might I see this as a First Attempt in Learning and revise? When I was making my prototype, on my first attempt to use it the spray nozzle wouldn’t work. As I was looking at the spray mechanism, I realized that the water I was using to simulate the hand sanitizer liquid wasn’t coming all the way up the tube from the bottom of the bucket. I realized that the spray nozzle wasn’t strong enough to pull the water up the tube. I was able to revise this by using a power nozzle that has a battery pump in it to pull liquid up in large containers.
Today is going to be my last reflection for Humanities for my grade 8 year. For this project we were tasked with making a book that would tell a story of an object from New France. For my object I told the story of a British Claymore sword used by Sergeant James Thompson. The main goal of the project was to show what life was like in New France. We started this project by making a video about an object that was important to us during this pandemic. Below is what I created.
After we made a video we researched different jobs in New France and had to create a character that we could feature in a story about New France. Then we had to communicated our character in one of several ways. One of the options was to make a Sports card that shows your character here is what I did.
Then it was finally time to make our stories. We started off by making a story mountain. Here is what i did for my story mountain. I tried to make the story exciting and similar in style to some of the historical films we watched in class, but I got the feedback that I had gone too far with the violence in my story mountain. I rewrote the story line to adjust the violence after I got this feedback.
The next step was to write our actual story, then put this story into book creator with an artifact write up and an about me page to make an ebook. Here is my final story.
Communicate: How did I share my own ideas when I wrote, spoke, and represented New France through my Stepping Stones and Milestones?
I feel that I showed this competency when I was telling my story. I showed this by telling what it was like in New France in my story using different characters that I researched, and using an artifact that I was interested in. I have done lessons about swordsmanship for a number of years so that is why I chose to tell the story of the Claymore sword.
Evidence: How did I evaluate evidence and artifacts to decide if they were adequate to support a historical conclusion and story?
I feel that I showed this when I was researching the artifact that I chose, which was the sword of Sergeant James Thompson. The main website for my research was a virtual museum and they had been able to trace the sword back to find its original owner, which I felt was enough evidence to support a historical conclusion. I thought that this could fit into a cool story of being passed down from generation to generation.
Today I will be reflecting on my last project for this school year in Scimatics! In this project we were tasked with planning the ultimate road trip that had a budget of $10,000, and we had to spend at least $9,500! For my road trip I started in San Francisco and drove along the coast to LA. But before we went on the theoretical road trip we had to pay for car rental. For my car I chose to use a Tesla. Since we would have to pay for gas I would rather just pay extra for car rental as the Tesla that I used costed $172 a day and charging was free.
Now I will talk about the most exciting activities that I did in LA. One of the first things that I did was go to Alcatraz. Alcatraz is a high security prison famous for having a lot of dangerous and well known criminals. The prison is almost impossible to escape from, partly because of all of the guards and the security measures that the prisoners go through each day, and partly because of how it is an island in the pacific ocean with cold water and dangerous currents and sharks. The next tourist attraction that I went to is the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a well known aquarium in California. The next place that I visited was Disneyland. I have never actually been to Disneyland and I would really like to go for a family vacation but I guess I’ll have to settle for a virtual visit for now. Another well known place that I go is Universal Studios, one of the biggest companies well known for their movies.
Below is all of the activities that I would do and the prices for my total of $9,891.
We also had to do an equation and graph for how much money we spent. It was kind of cool to see the spending for our trip in a graph. Below that is the map for my virtual trip, including the charging stations I would use along the way.
Now I will reflect on the competencies:
Reasoning and Analyzing: Estimate reasonably.
I showed this when I was making the budget list. When I was making this list I didn’t want to go over budget but I wanted to spend as close to the 10,000 as I could. So when I was planning my trip I decided to estimate what the cost of each activity was before I did it. This resulted in me doing my budget quicker and more easily.
Connecting and Reflecting: connect mathematical concepts to each other and to other areas of personal interests.
I showed this when I was planning where I wanted to go. When I was choosing destinations I thought of it like I was just out of college and I was planning a trip to celebrate graduating. I chose to make all the destinations places that I would go in real life. I connected different math concepts together such as guess and check and using addition to figure out how much each activity would cost for how long I was there for and the parking prices and the actual price of the activity.
Communicating and Representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictoral, and symbolic form.
I showed this when I was making a map of my trip. I used pictoral methods for showing my trip on the map, and I put symbols in all the stops that I would make along the way.
I hope you enjoyed my virtual road trip as much as I did imagining it.
Today I will be reflecting on my first year of PLP! This first year of high school in the PLP program has been quite a roller coaster. There have been fun projects, and there have been stressful projects, and some times a little bit of both. Today I am going to be reflecting on all of my PLP classes, but most importantly my growth as a learner in all my PLP classes. These classes include Humanities, Scimatics and Maker. The driving question that I will be using to reflect on this post is “Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level?”
The first thing I will reflect on is Humanities. I think Humanities is one of the best examples of my growth as a learner. I started out this year with a project called The Media is The Message that was hard for me. I struggled with trying to finish all my work, trying to do it to the best of my abilities, and trying to stay on top of all my other projects. I learned from the projects we did for this Milestone that I need to pay more attention to instructions and details that we are told in class to help us wth our projects. I did a lot of revisions in this project. By mid-year, I was more focused in class and I was able to complete more of my work in class, which allowed me to get some immediate feedback on the work I was doing and correct things before I had done too much work in the wrong direction. I was getting better at balancing my work on all my courses so I was less distracted by thinking about all the other things I had to do in my other classes.
I was more focused and more engaged in class when we did This Changes Everything. I was also more interested in this subject matter. I realized by this time that when I have trouble focusing in class, it is often because of a lack of interest in the subject we are working on. In my mPOL my question for my teachers and my parents addressed this as I asked what I could do to keep my focus when discussions are about something I am not as interested in. I found one of the things that helps me is if I know there is group work in a project. I get overwhelmed and tune out if the subject is one I’m not interested in and I have to do everything myself. If there is group work, it eases my mind and I know I can do a part of the project where I can use my talents and what I am good at. As well, if I have other people to be accountable to for deadlines, I seem to do better with meeting them. I showed this growth in the It’s the End of the World project. I struggled with understanding parts of this project, but I was able to do a good job on the assignments because of the group work.
I had some struggles again when we moved to working at home and on-line classes because the group work wasn’t happening the same in Humanities. There were a lot of revisions in Argh Matey because I didn’t listen well enough to details and misunderstood how we were supposed to do our animations. I needed Ms. Maxwell’s help with this and I was able to show my growth as a learner in that I did my revisions and had a great comic at the end of the project.
The next class that I will talk about is Scimatics. This was one of my favorite classes since it was full of things that I was interested in, such as 3D modeling, lasers and diseases. I think that I have developed a lot from starting out in the year with having a hard time with Fractions of Your Time. I wasnt as focused since it was the begging of the year and I was forgetting to record how much time I spent doing different activities so I had to estimate some of the times. In the middle of the year for our Winter Exhibition, we did a project called Mazer tag. It was at this point in time that I decided to spend less time on worrying about assignments and instead start doing them right away. This was a big turning point and it was a really fun project to do since it was all about Star Wars, which has been my favourite movie ever since I was really young. It was a really good way of teaching me about light and lasers. This way of teaching enabled me to do really well on this project, and I got excited with my results and started to spend more time on doing my projects.
I had finally started to spend more time working on school and less time worrying about school, and I was starting to be more organized. I think that the next project that shows how much I have progressed as a learner was the Ultimate Design Challenge. This was a project that taught me a lot about 3D modelling, which is something that I have always wanted to learn. I think will really help me in real life since I am getting into game design and it really helps me whenever I decide to model characters. Another reason that it has shown how I have progressed as a learner is how it allowed me to take something that I really like, and push that skill to extend my learning and my project.
The third and final class that I will talk about in this blog post is Maker, which has been one of the most hands on classes, which I like, and also one of the most stressful. The first way that I will show how I progressed as a learner is in one of the first projects, Big Life Journal. I was very stressed when I did this project because of all of the work and trying to get to know all of my classmates so I spent more time talking to people than doing my work. This lead to me waking up super early on weekends to try to get everything done that was due for the week. In the end, I did well on the project and I realized that I should become more organized rather than just do everything early in the morning. I decided to start a tiny schedule in my head and whenever they would give us more work I would make a mental note for when I was going to do the assignment. This worked for a while until my mind started to get cluttered with when to do assignments and I had no room for how to do them.
The project that I think really turned this around was when we did DI. I found it really easy to find out when we were going to do things and how to do things since we had a burndown chart and I really started to get organized with that. Me and my group decided to plan a bunch of things and I became more organized. Even with the stress of this project I was able to keep my composure.
Something that I think helped the most with my organization was when we had to move to online school because of COVID. I found it really helped me get organized since my parents were always there to help me and remind me what to do. My mom wrote out a calendar in the kitchen with everything that was due that week. I found this really helpful except that sometimes when I left my room to go downstairs and check what I needed to work on next, I would get distracted by something and get off track. Eventually we decided to get a calendar for planning when I would do things for my room that was always on my desk so I could always see it. As soon as I did this, I was always on top of things. This is when we started the Witness to History project, which I was able to complete with a lot more ease than a lot of the other projects. This project is the project that lead me up to the project that I am doing now, our BlueSky project. In the beginning of the BlueSky project I didn’t see a few of the tasks so I was behind where I should have been. So I sat down with Basecamp and my room calendar and set times for when I was going to do things, and then I was on top of things again.
I have learned a lot this year about myself as a learner. I need tools to keep me on track for assignments so I can focus on doing work instead of worrying about doing the work. If I stay focused in class, I can do more work in class which means I have less work to do at home, and my work stays on track because I can get feedback right away. I learned that unlike in elementary school, I like group projects and I do well in them. I know I have more work to do on my focus and I need to continue to improve paying attention to details and keep up with my organization skills but I think I am ready for Grade 9.
today I will be talking about my latest Maker project called “Witness to History” for this project our driving question was can How we, as photojournalists tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing? i will answer this at the end of the blog post. in this project we were tasked with making a photo essay on how covid-19 has effected a community of our choosing.
the first thing that we did for this project was learn about photo journalism. in this stage we watched videos of photo journalism to inspire us for what we wanted to do. the next stage was to practice photo taking. so for this our job was to take a few different photos of ourselves and everyday objects. here are the photos that i took for this part of the project.
the next thing that we did was do an interview with someone in our community and i chose to interview someone in my community named bari z. she is a grade 12 student who had an impact from there graduation. I thought that it was a good idea to interview them since i think that they were probably someone that had the most amount of impact from this virus in my community. here is the interview
the next step was to identify 5 different themes about the things that they said these are the themes that i identified are: people have become more sanitary, people are more cautious, people are more generous, people are more uncertain, she is more seperated from her family.
the next part of the project was to make a story board of what we are going to take pictures of. for this part we had to draw what we were going to take pictures of here is what i drew for my pictures
the next thing that we did was actually take the pictures and edit them and then put them into a book in book creator. then we presented it too a classmate for peer critique and the teacher for some feedback. here is the final draft of my book
now to answer the driving question which is can How we, as photojournalists tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing?: I feel that me as a photojournalist told the story of my community through this project quite well. I feel that I did a good job with representing the feeling of my community through my photos. I feel like the people looking at the photos can tell themselves the stories just from looking at the image.
thank you for reading my post hope y’all have a good rest of your day!
today i will be talking about my latest combined class project. the project was a combination of Scimatics and my Humanities class. the scimatics portion of the project was learning about cells and diseases (i thought that it tied in really well with what is happening today in our world) and the humanities portion learning about different explorers from the 15th century. the first part of the scimatics portion was learning about what cells and diseases do to our body. the first portion of the humanities project was learning about how canada was found. the second part of the scimatics portion was choosing a disease from the 15th century, I chose to use the disease tuberculosis. i chose this disease because I thought that it was a pretty cool disease with the way that it attacks the lungs and what some of the symtoms are. for the second part of the humanities portion of the project we had to chose our explorer, for mine I chose francis drake. i chose him because i thought that it was cool how he was the first ever elplorer to circumnavigate the globe. (maybe also how his name was the easiest to remember because of the uncharted game that is based around him) the third part of the scimatics portion was to research our disease. i learned a lot about how tuberculosis (also known as TB) travels through the body and how it attacks the lungs and that it can spread through dust particals that are floating in the air. the next part that we did for humanities was making a story spine for what our comic was going to be about. the next part of scimatics was taking a unit quiz on cells and diseases using khan academy. now that we were done all the learning it was time to start making the comic book. for making the comic book we used an app called comic life. one thing that i really like about it, is how simple and easy to use it is. it is really easy to add pages and to add drawings and text bubbles and decorating the page. the only thing that i dont really like about it is how the drawings that i made in sketches pro were distorted and looked different going into the app. enough talk about the steps of the project. so here is my actual comic
now i will reflect on the core competencies of the project.
Scimatics:
Communicating: communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems, using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies:
I feel that I showed this when I was picking a disease that spreads fast due to it being airborne in a small space enough to infect an entire ship of sailors so they had to stop sailing and in the time zone of when the comic takes place.
Humanities:
Establish Historical Significance: how do we make choices about what is worth remembering?:
I feel that I showed this when making my book through showing the different events that were real life events in my comic and seperating them from the events that I cut out and changed
Connect: how do I understand my own and others personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?:
When we had to read the comics I found that it was really hard to connect to them since in the comics it was a fictional world I found it much easier to connect with the story of sir Francis drake since he is a real person.
Today I will be reflecting on a DI tournament that my class did since DI was cancelled due to covid-19. For the tournament we had 3 days to meet with our team online using Zoom. To check out my first post on the DI regional tournament which explains DI and what my team did originally, click the link. In this post I will talk about the changes that my team made in class before spring break, and the bigger changes we had to make when school didn’t go back after spring break.
Before spring break, our group decided to make quite a few changes such as changing our claws’ colour from white to black to make them more realistic. We also simplified the claw arm that knocks over the trees since that wasn’t one of the focuses for points. We added more leaves to the trees so that they look more realistic. After we made these changes it was spring break so we had to put our progress on hold. Then DI provincials was canceled due to covid-19.
The cancellation of the tournament didn’t stop us from presenting to our class though. We made our presentations online through Zoom, and did our Instant Challenges that way as well. Now I will talk about the changes and challenges about presenting the tournament online. One of the main challenges with presenting online was the fact that we weren’t in sync due to it being online. Another challenge was that we all had to remake things like claws and other props that we had left at school. We weren’t allowed to go out and buy things to keep to the guidelines to stay home so we had to use things that we found at our house to make props such as fur. We had to make our narrator Nate look like a host in a nature documentary so that he would seem to be in the environment and the story with us instead of being just a narrator. In addition, we added lyrics to the ukulele song. We still had to show the trees fall over in our performance but we didn’t have our claw arm so we decided to do this by making a video of a tree falling over and using it as our virtual background. We decided to make our story longer, we added an extra day and extra night to add a little bit more time. It was really hard to make the tree fall over when one of the monkeys tries to climb it, so during the extra day we added to our performance, we decided to show how some of the trees fall over due to the monkeys eating the leaves and killing the trees. We were then able to change our virtual back ground in accordance to what is happening to the environment. Our virtual backgrounds that we used are in the gallery below.
main background
when it is night time
after the night that tree fell over
dead forest at the end
And here is the video that we used to make the tree fall.
In the online tournament, I think that we did a pretty good job even with some of the obstacles in our way. I think that we definitely improved from the last time that we performed (here’s the link to that post which includes the video of our Regional’s performance DI regional tournament).
Now I will reflect on the curricular competency.
Research and Understanding:
I showed this competency when trying to come up with a solution to our problems with being online such as being out of sync and not having our props for the environment.
Thank you for reading my blog. You can click on the names of my teammates to see their take on our virtual DI tournament: Raymond, Julien, Ryder, Nate.
