Blue sky has come and gone, and its almost the end of the year. Do I need to remind you of the rules of blue sky or should I just link you to my previous post?

This year, I made something I’m really proud of. I made the SleepyMcSleepwell, an inflatable pillow. the idea was to help with many kinds of sleep problems. I know pillows already do this, but i combined a whole bunch of ideas into one (or two, i didn’t have time to connect them). They’re inflatable so you can have whatever firmness of pillow you want. If you want a firmer pillow you can. If you want a softer pillow, you can.

DRAFT 1

Draft one was a simple drawing. You can see that the head pillow has a divot or valley for your head. Your head goes in the valley, and the valley walls support your neck. If you didn’t want/need a neck pillow, you could just flip it over and have a regular pillow. Attached to the side is a body pillow if you’re a side sleeper like me. Resting against the body pillow helps with spinal alignment, and is just more comfortable.

DRAFT 2

This is just a proof of concept for the head pillow, and its not very good. I took a bike inner tube and stitched fabric around it. The point was to get an idea of what I could do for DRAFT 3.  For the head pillow, a bike tire might have worked, but I certainly wouldn’t have worked for the body length pillow. Having 4-5 bike tires all needing to be separately inflated would have been bad.

DRAFT 3

For draft 3 my dad found some heat-sealing plastic that we used to make the bladders. We just used a waxing iron to seal the plastic, and we made chambers so the pillow didn’t bulge out as much. At first, we had problems with the seal around the valve not holding. The valve was made of a different kind of plastic, and the glue stuck to either one or the other. So we taped it. After the chambers had been made, we wrapped some pillow material around the chambers, sewed it to itself, and put the two pillows in a pillow case. 

EXHIBITION DAY

For exhibition day, we were put into 6 groups based on the grade 10’s projects. I was in the Physical Health Group, and we were in the PLP room. We had two sections, physical activity and medical, and I was in the medical section.

INTERVIEW

We all had to get an interview with a person who knew a lot about our topic. I got an interview with a woman named Denise james, a friend of my aunts who works at sleep country Canada. Admittedly, I sent her the email a bit late, but thankfully I got a reply the next day. 

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During this project I learned a lot about two things; time management and building with less than ideal materials. This project should have been assigned a week or two earlier, or spent less time on stuff that was unnecessary to the actual project. Because we had much more limited time, I needed to work on blue sky for a couple hours each day. The materials didn’t help much either. Building a pillow with packaging plastic? Ridiculous for anybody not in PLP. Or maybe im crazy an there was a much better way to do it. 

Have you heard of the man who fought for the Metis? Do you even know what a Metis is? If you answered yes to either of those questions, you should still read this post. 

“Metis” is a french word meaning mixed, and if you are/were a Metis, that means you have both european and First Nations blood. The most well known Metis settlement was the Red River, which became Winnipeg. 

A man named Louis Riel was born in the settlement in 1844. He became a controversial politician, as he thought the rights of the Metis people weren’t being respected. A lot of Metis supported him, but the Canadians (he started fighting after confederation) thought of him as a megalomaniac and a murderer leading a group of savages. 

But how did he get so controversial? We read a comic strip biography about his life. The author had to leave out some details, but he kept all the important events. In the book the first major event was when Riel accused a man of being a spy. The man was able to escape, before being caught a brutally killed by Thomas Scott. Thomas was arrested, and held in fort Garry. If anyone was insane, it’d be Thomas. Staying up all night screaming insults and swears at the Metis and First Nations guards. It was so bad his cell mates asked for him to be moved to a different cell. 

After a while, the guards asked Riel if they could execute Thomas. Riel was reluctant at first, but he eventually agreed to Thomas’ execution. Through local newspaper the event eventually got to Canada, and a new newspaper was printed. Because the news can and will bias towards their side, important details were “forgotten” and Riel was deemed a villain. 

Through a large snowball of events, Canadian soldiers decided to invade the area. Riel and his men defended, but were still called the villains because the “killed hundreds of brave Canadian soldiers” even though the Canadians invaded their land and the Metis were defending it.

Riel saw that too many people were dying to either protect him or kill him, so he turned himself in.

Even then, people were still trying to defend him. After 13 days of trial, the judge decided he was guilty of high treason. He was transported to Saskatchewan to be hanged so the Metis couldn’t defend him as easily. 

But was he the villain? Well, I don’t think so. Sure, he did order the execution of Thomas Scott. But Thomas wasn’t innocent. He killed a man, and committed treason, so execution seemed like a reasonable punishment (not by todays standards though). The media portrayed Thomas as an innocent man, but he got the justice he deserved. The Canadian government wanted an excuse to take control over the settlement. 

Despite all Riel went through, he used his power to make his voice heard, and he still has an impact on Winnipeg today. Just like Richard Clement Moody, the man I made an animation about for my last project. We were tasked with making a short animation about a person or group of people who used their power to influence Canada in some way. This person had to be before WWI, and west of Ontario. 

I wanted to do the person who created Vancouver, and I thought that Captain George Vancouver was that man. Vancouver island was settled before Vancouver, and the island is named after him. But after doing some research, I found that Richard Clement Moody first settled in the Vancouver area. 

First off, why Moody? Well, Moody was promoted to a Major-General of a group of Royal Engineers, the British Columbia Detachment, to be exact. Their goal was to create a settlement on the border of the US to claim the Fraser Gold Fields for Canada. 

The group planned to go to Victoria, then travel to the mainland. Along the way, the Royal Engineers, British Columbia Detachment picked up people who wanted to travel with them. The REBCD brought them along to Victoria, until Moody arrived with his family. They traveled to the mainland, and created a settlement along the Fraser River. Moody named this settlement New Westminster. 

Because the gold rush doesn’t happen for the next couple years, New Westminster was small, and not much happened for the first year. That is, until the merchants went to Moody asking for a trail from New Westminster to Burrard inlet. This would allow for easier trade between New Westminster and other cities. Moody had a very military-centric mind, so he saw the trail as a boost to military and navy, so he built it. He named it Kingsway, and it still exists today.

New Westminster was still small, even after the gold rush. Until the CPR was planned to end in New Westminster. Many new workers came in beginning the long, treacherous build of a railway from New Westminster eastern, through the Rocky Mountains. New Westminster gained a huge boost of population, and workers moved there with their families. They were all exited to finish the largest transcontinental railway at the time.

In the video, I mainly used an app called FlipaClip, a fun animation app. For transitions and characters moving across the screen, I used magic moves in Keynote. At the beginning, I had my friends Jamie Ball and Kiefer Hogg to help with the live action part. In it, Jamie asks me who created vancouver. I begin to tell him, and the animation begins. 

I learned a lot about animation during this project. I learned that hand drawing is really slow, and I wasn’t even drawing with much detail. Magic moves is a lot faster, but doesn’t look as good in my opinion. If I ever need to animate something again, I’ll have to see how long I have, an the quality I want the video to be. 

With a countdown song in the back of my head, we had one final project for math and science; correlation vs causation.

For those who don’t know, multiple data points have correlation when they have a similar trend and are caused by a similar underlying thing. An example would be ice cream sales and bike sales increasing during the summer. Both increase due to better, warmer weather.

 

Causation is when one point of data directly impacts another. When those bike sales increase, more people ride bikes. If there are more bikes on the road, trail, whatever, more bike tires will pop. The increase in tires popped is causes by an increase in bike ridden per day.

With Robin, we made a video talking about correlation vs causation. We used those exact examples, and two more we had to find ourselves. We looked at both arm span and height, and population size and life expectancy.

First was arm span vs height. We got data from both our classmates and data online. But how do you measure something like this? Well, from a previous experiment, we knew the height of our test subjects in CM, and we could get the arm span easily. We had the test subjects hold the meter stick in one hand WITHOUT compromising the test, and put another stick against the end of the first. Where the tip of the middle finger was is the length of your arm span. After this test we found that the average arm span was about 1-2 centimeters longer than the average height. So yes, there is a correlation between the two.

Next up; something I wasn’t expecting. But before that, the causation section. We chose to find a causation between the population of a country and the life expectancy of that country. We went to a website called Gapminder to find our data. Gapminder has a whole bunch of data from population to country age to the amount of people who have access to a computer. We found what we’re looking for.

We were expecting for life expectancy to decrease as population decreased. Not a lot, but as population increased, there would be less space for housing and farms, and the resources for the poor would decrease, thus they would die sooner. But we found the exact opposite. There are many reasons at play here, but we think that as population increases, more people Han improve the life expectancy by helping out with food, sharing resources and more. In turn, the population increases as life expectancy increases, because more people are alive at one time.

Correlation and causation are in our daily lives, but we barely notice them. These were just a couple examples of correlations and causations. Some have obvious reasons for existing, but you may have to dig deep to find the reasons for others.