on Hi, my name is Matthew. I’m a 9th-grade student from Vancouver British Columbia. I enjoy computers, video games, programming, and politics. I have a dog named Rex and a cat named Coda. I mostly spend my free time playing around with my computer while watching something. I also really enjoy hanging out with friends and watching movies.
on For this year I will be changing my avatar to Howard the duck from the live action movie Howard the duck. The reason this will be my new avatar is because the Howard the duck comics that the movie is based on were the first comics I ever owned. Another reason I decided to pick this as my avatar is because I find the character quite funny like it’s a duck that smoke cigars and fights villains how is that not funny.
on For my second blogpost of this year I will be talking about one of our smaller projects we’ve done so far which was our game of exponents project for math. For this project what we had to do was make a boardgame based around exponent laws in groups of two although I was in a group of three. The first thing we had to do was come up with our game idea so being that me and my group mates (Brenton, Ryan, and me) are pretty political we decided to make a game where you run for president which I thought sounded pretty fun. After we came up with our idea we had to get it approved by the teacher which we did thankfully. Now that we had our idea approved by the teacher it was time to start writing the rules.
In my opinion coming up with the rules was the second most fun thing we did in this project aside from actually playing the game. How we ended up doing the rules was we brainstormed and then Ryan would write them down with detail which worked well. After we made the rules it was time to start on the actual board and game pieces. Our board just ended up being a map of America cut up into regions. The more interesting thing we had to make for our game was the cards because for the images on them we found political memes or got funny images that fit with what it said on the card. The final thing we had to get for the game were the game coins and the die which ended up being pretty easy because for the currency we ended up just using cents.
now that we had our game pieces and board done it was time to show it to other people to get feedback so in class there everybody swapped with another group and they would play our group and we would play theirs and give them feedback. We got decent there were a few things we had to change for example they said it was a little slow. With that feed back we had a few days to fix our game which we did. Now that we had the final versions of our games it was time to show it to a different class by that I mean another class came to our class and groups of twos played our games and I have to say our game had great reception from the group that played it.
in conclusion this was a super fun project and I learned a ton about exponents and truly this is a project that I would do again.
Here are the rules
on For the first blog post of this year I will be talking about about one of our most recent projects. This project was about how place effects us. The first thing we did in this project was getting the driving question how does place effect us which led to an introductory assignment on how place specifically effects ourselves. For this I made a mind map with four categories weather, Healthcare, Deep Cove, and Wilderness from those categories I listed some ways those things effected me for example under weather I put used to the cold because Vancouver tends to be a pretty cold area so as you grow up you slowly adapt to the heat/weather.
After we finished that we started our next milestone where we had to write a paragraph about an article we read except there was a catch we were in groups of four and each person was given a lens for example mine was political. The article my group read was an article about the pipeline and making more jobs. I liked the article my group was assigned because it was political and that was perfect because that was my lens.
The next things we did was get the groups that we would have during the Alberta trip for me that was Jude, Angelo, and Alex. We also got our peoples groups which basically means the specific group of people you would be interviewing about how Alberta effects them. For example my group got Albertans so we had to ask Albertans about how living there effects them in different ways. Another thing we had to do for this was pick lenses to use when interviewing I picked political. After we got our groups and peoples we had to start planning for the trip by making a trip planning sheet. The planning sheet was so we knew what we would need to do while in Alberta and so our teacher knew we knew what we were doing.
By the time we had finished our planning sheets it was time to go to Alberta which was hard due to the fact we had to get to the school by 6:30 which meant getting up at 5:30 so I could make sure I had everything I needed for the trip. After having a shower collecting my bags I left for the school. When I arrived I was met with the news that I was in the van which from experience can either be a blessing or a curse so when I got in the very back seat and there was tons of leg space I was like 🥳 and it was that way for around maybe like 3 hours until we had to pick up one of our teachers and bam 💥 no leg room but enough with that. after that we went to lunch and stopped at the last spike which was interesting after that we went to the three valley gap where we would be sleeping the night but first we would have to film a video for our maker class but I’m not going to get into that. Before I talk about what we did next I would like to talk about something I forgot to earlier which is the daily note what we did in the daily note was each day we were given a question to answer for example what are you most looking forward to. Now I’m going to skip to the really important part of this trip which were our interviews our first two interviews were at a market where we talked to a very nice man named Bernie who owned a farm we also talked to a younger man who worked as a a brewer for a gin distillery the next guy we interviewed worked at a ski resort that we visited who was very interesting the final interview we had was with a nice lady who worked at the world’s largest dinosaur.
before I finish off with the trip part of this blog post I just want to talk about a few highlights. One beakerhead I really enjoyed beakerhead because it’s all about science and art my favourite exhibit/art piece was one where it tracked your movements and made like a digital copy of you. Another thing we did was beaker night which is like the bigger brother to the beakerhead event we went to the night before and if I’m being honest it was better mostly because it was a lot bigger of an event and there were sculptures that could breath fire.
once we got back from our trip I had two things I still had to do for this project edit and revise my video and finish my now late daily note the daily note was the easiest thing I had to get done where as the video took longer because we had two do a draft before our final video. Overall finishing the video wasn’t too hard even though I ended up procrastinating on some of things we had to do for it.
in conclusion I think this was a great project and overall I learned a ton whether it’s how place effects people or about dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrell Museum I can’t truly say this was a great learning experience that I will remember for the rest of my life.