Actually the title is true, it did. But I poured my heart into it so ooh boy, lets do this. Final post, launch! We’ve had a crazy year so far and I honestly never thought I’d be writing my last blog post of grade 8 ever but here I am. Heres a little sneak-peek of what you’ll see on this post: Lots about the Spring Exhibition, tons about BlueSky, our LAUNCH process and a huge reflection throughout the whole post. Thats a lot of info to take in so stay with me as we start the journey toward grade 9 PLP, starting with this last blog post of grade 8! Here we go! 

Alright, I said I’d talk about the Spring Exhibition but first lets talk about how we got there. We started with Ms. Willemse exporting a LAUNCH journal to us in the numbers app and we immediately went into the first step which was Look, Listen and Learn. That was about trying to figure out our ideas, and we did questions were asked, like what types of people do you want to help, or whats a specific issue you want to help with. Below is what I first wrote when I was coming up with my idea.

FIRST TIMES A CHARM! NOPE. 

I was first thinking about making some kind of vehicle that was powered by a water wheel, which I know looking back, sounds ridiculous. But at that time I was stubborn and I wanted to do it so I moved onto the next part, Ask a Ton of Questions. I did some interviews with my classmates but I never really expanded further other than asking PLP students. I asked questions like ‘do you want to help the environment’ or ‘why would someone want to buy my vehicle’, obviously not very important ones that would help me get far in my BlueSky project. I felt like I had no other choices but to keep going so thats what I did. Next was writing a pitch form, which had to be approved by Ms. Willemse and Mr. Hughes. Now here comes the hard part. I pitched my idea to my teachers, and they immediately sent me back for revision. I hadn’t even made it to what research I needed to do to create this before they laughed and sent me back. Not going to lie, that was pretty defeating. I felt like there were no other options, and I remember looking out my car window (like I was in a movie) and thinking I hit a dead end. Ms. Willemse told me to revise my idea but I took that as ‘start again’ so that’s exactly what I did. Now I’m not saying if you fail just give up and think of something else, I’m saying if you fail, get your butt up from the ground and give it another shot. So thats exactly what I did.

FINALLY, AN IDEA! 

In the back of my mind I’d had an idea but I didn’t know if this would work, but I mean I’d hit a block so might as well try it right? Probably the best decision I made at that point, because I am crazy proud of my end result and I am so happy with how hard I worked on this. Anyways, I pitched the idea of creating something digital, a website, about raising awareness for airborne diseases in general. Ms. Willemse caught onto that idea and encouraged me to pursue it, but she wanted me to focus on only one disease and provide information on only that one. Oh my gosh. I cannot tell you how many times I went back to her telling her different disease and why I should create a website on them. I went through Tuberculosis, HPV, Diabetes, and finally Measles. Measles saved my life, don’t worry not literally! But it did save me for BlueSky because, once and for all, I WAS APPROVED. I don’t think you know how happy I was when Ms. Willemse gave me the ‘nod of approval’. Monumental moment in my life. I swear I was crying. Nah just kidding, I’m as strong as a rock, except when it comes to Shawn Mendes.

BUNDLING + GROUPING

The next month was crazy because all of our teachers for each subject was throwing final projects and exams in our faces and on top of all that, PLP was working on BlueSky. BlueSky was a huge priority for me because I knew that I could portray my topic as week or I got finish with a strong argument and really change people’s perspective. Through all of that, we started the N phase which was Navigate. We installed an app that helped us group and bundle our ideas and help us kind of categorize them so that when we created our projects, we could manage each at our own pace. This part wasn’t much of an issue for me but along the way I did scrap some ideas that I didn’t have time for, but if I could go back, if I had more time I would have definitely included them. I planned to create a poster board, a website, and a Kahoot. In the end I scraped the poster board but I did follow through with my website and Kahoot. I also created a special surprise but that’s for the end. This is what my bundling looked like:

PODCAST

Plan, Organize, Design, Construct, Alter, Stage, Test. I came up with this acronym when we started the Create phase. The class was going through the LAUNCH process, but I was going through my own process called PODCAST. I had already gone through my Planning and Organizing part and now I was working on my Designing, Constructing and Altering part. Designing was pretty easy, I signed up for a weebly account (a website making company) and chose a theme for my website (which I changed definitely more than 10 times) and chose fonts, pictures, all the stuff like that. Constructing took a while because that was all about getting the information that would be in my website, and what categories would be filled with what information. This took a tiring 2 weeks, everyday I’d come home, do research on one topic and write it down in notability.

I tried to make each paragraph of info short but also fun so that people are motivated to read it. Moving on to Alter, I ran into things like trying to centre the text to picking what info needed to get out and what needed to stay. I had to alter my perspective and not be so focused on why my website wouldn’t save properly to how I can fix my bigger problem. Stage and Test came in the U section (Understand) which was before Navigate, which carried on into the section after Navigate, H phase: Highlight and Fix. Staging was about asking people, doing some testing, surveys and getting information from resources, primary and secondary. Now this is where I got lucky. I knew some people that grew up in a third world country and never had the chance to get their measles vaccine. So I put together a survey and had them take it, basically asking them what kind of info would persuade them to get the vaccine and I got back this: 

So I used it and created my first prototype. Which looked like: 

Pretty bad right? Well I think so. It wasn’t very appealing to me, so I wanted to work on it everyday to make it suite my taste but a week before the Spring Exhibition we had to put our BlueSky on pause because of our Colonizing in a Tempest project which you can go check out if you click here.The next week we went super hard on BlueSky, having the Exhibition on the Friday of that week. Everyday I would log in to my account everyday and make changes and the Thursday before the Exhibition was probably the hardest night I ever worked ever. This was the last project of the year and I wanted to make a really big impact so that my grades would be good. I stayed up till 1 am but I fell asleep with something that I was very very insanely proud of! 

Okay okay I know I made you wait at least 5 paragraphs so here you go. My final website that I presented at the exhibition. 

If you want to browse the website in its full entirety, click  here.

THE SPRING EXHIBITION 

I can’t believe its over but I can tell you one thing for sure, my feet still hurt. It was a really fun experience but nothing like the Winter Exhibition. For winter we were in groups and all shared the same topic between 4 or 5 people. This time it was our own ideas, our own creations and inventions. I presented my BlueSky along with my PGP Time Machine, which you can go check out if you click here. . One lady even told me to go on junior Dragons Den and pitch my game to them. Crazy right? Yeah I know but the immense proudness and happiness I felt was really rewarding to all the hard-work I put into both projects. I talked to maybe 30 people, and each expressed that they had a similar opinion regarding the Anti-Vaccination movement and they gave me very constructive and helpful comments to help my progress. In the end, I think my BlueSky was a huge success and to quote The Hulk ‘I see this as an absolute win!’. 

I mentioned I took on an extra project just for fun and its quite a treat honestly, so enjoy!

(In case you guys were wondering, yes I re-wrote Ice Ice Baby)

If you want to catch up on the whole year, and my personal reflection on it, check out my TPols for more!

Thank you guys from the bottom of my heart for reading all of this and keeping up with me, I might just change my blog to KUWMJ (Keeping Up With Malaika Javer). I think I have grown immensely as a learner throughout this year and I made some tough decisions that shaped my ending in PLP 8 but it was 100% for the best. Thank you to all my teachers, students, friends, family, and of course all my blog readers for being a part of my life. I love you all. See you in grade 9! 

~Malaika:)