Well then.

You’re back.

So let’s get right into another blog post.

I’m pretty sure everyone in the greater Vancouver area has heard of a place called Deep Cove. I’m lucky enough to live near there, and go to school directly in the Cove. It’s a small village like area nestled in a small bay in the Indian Arm. It has multiple tourist attractions like Quarry Rock, Deep Cove Kayak Shop, and many really cool shops and restaurants. The tourism can get pretty crazy in the summer as it’s a small area with a lot of people. But what does this have to do with anything?

In my high school Seycove Secondary, located in Deep Cove, the PLP cohorts of the school all join forces at the end of each year to make a large scale exhibition showing off our projects. We call it Blue Sky, and it takes off an idea from Apple that let’s its employees spend a little time a week on a project of their own idea. I have done two other Blue Sky exhibitions, and they are quite interesting. But I’ll tell you about the one we just had, on June 14, 2018.

Something all the PLP students know about is something called the Launch Cycle. It is an process created by John Spencer that makes it easier for people to use design thinking and come up with project ideas and products. We have used it every year in our Blue Sky projects.

But before I explain how the launch cycle integrates with my project, I need to tell you about a major aspect of the exhibition this year. It’s something called the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Essentially, they are 17 different goals with varying aspects that are aiming for creating a fully sustainable Earth for all. Each goal zeros in on a different problem in our world and is trying to help people become engaged in solving those goals in big or small ways. For our Blue Sky, we divided up our projects by the different goal categories.

First, we chose which goal we wanted to work under. I was in a group with Kyle, Reid, Alex and Calum and we would be working on Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure. The main statement for this goal was:

“Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation”

So our projects had to help solve this problem in some way. So our team got to work thinking of ideas. We could choose if we wanted to be individual, in twos or all together, but it would depend on the project. We got to work and thought of a few ideas, but Ms. Willemse was helping us think reasonably and guiding us down the right path because those ideas either were out of reach in two weeks, or not under our category. The project we settled on was an Audio Tour Of Deep Cove.

This was considered under infrastructure as it dealt with the major tourism problems in deep cover at the moment. And so, our LAUNCH Cycle began.

L – Look, Listen and Learn

This phase focused on having an awareness. In our case, it was an awareness of a problem. Like I said at the beginning, the tourism in deep cove was getting very busy. We were aware of this because in deep cove, there is the idea to restrict the number of people on Quarry Rock that might be put into place. Another extremely evident example is that it’s almost always impossible to find parking in the Cove, showing the extreme cause of tourism. We became aware of that problem and were looking to solve it.

A – Ask Tons Of Questions

In the second phase, we decided to ask people we knew that either lived in Deep Cove, or worked there some questions about their opinion on the problem we identified. We talked to two staff members at the Deep Cove Kayak shop, and they told us they were constantly being asked where Quarry Rock is and how to get there. They also told us that the kayak shop is often overloaded on hot summer days because of all the people coming to rent kayaks. Kyle and Reid, two of our group members who also live in the Cove said that they have less privacy due to all the people parking on their streets. Reid even said people tried to camp on his front lawn. This example is something we wanted to help solve in our project.

U – Understand The Process or Problem

Now that we have heard from people who have had real life experiences with the problem we identified, we need to understand what they are saying. We needed to find out more information on what is going on in Deep Cove. We then conducted more research online about the major points of interest in the Cove, and what people thought of them. We also just looked at reviews people have left about deep cove. Click the image below to read an article we found about Deep Cove.

N – Navigate Ideas

In this phase we were to combine, edit and exchange ideas about our solution. Since we knew we were aiming to create an Audio Tour, we needed to decide how to actually create and format it as a product. We all put our heads together and decided we wanted to create three different routes, with three different Tour playlists. We would have each tour go to 5-6 points of interest along each route and explain a little facts, history and what you can do there while keeping it short and informative. First we chose our routes and selected our points of interest we would highlight in our playlists.

This was our main idea, and we would experiment with formatting when we moved onto the next phase.

C – Create a Prototype

As our first prototype, we decided to just create one of our three playlists, and then get feedback and revise so we could apply that new knowledge to all three tours. We selected the Main Street route to do our first prototype on. After researching about each location, writing our script, and then me recording my voiceover for the tour, we were ready to put it into a playlist. We put it into SoundCloud as we were all familiar and it was free. We then took photos of each location and added the photo to the corresponding audio clip. This was our first prototype.

H – Highlight and Fix

In this phase we looked over what we have created and figure out what is working and what is not. We made some revisions in the quality of the audio, and some minor changes with the scripts of the tour. We also changed a bit of the formatting and created a whole new SoundCloud account just for the audio tours. Overall though, we were happy with our first prototype and moved onto completing the other two. And that’s just what we did. And then, we were ready.

Final Product

Here you can see our three finished audio tour playlists. We have one of Panorama Park and Quarry Rock, one of Main Street (Gallant Ave), and one of Deep Cove’s waterfront. This is what we were going to present at the Exhibiton. We would have our iPads with the playlists ready, connected to a speaker that we could play for people who were interested. We also took 360 photos of some point of interests, and had them showcased at our table via Calum’s iPad.

LAUNCH

We can also call this stage the Blue Sky Exhibition.  Since the grade 8s and 9s were also under the same Sustainable Goals as us, we teamed up with the other students that had projects fitting the Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure Idea.

To enhance the experience of the exhibition, our now massive group worked together to theme one area of the school to make it look like an Industrial Area. We worked for a few hours after school thinking and creating props and decorations that would add to our area’s aesthetic. I really think our group did well considering it was difficult to theme an area that would scream “Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure”… We also had a sort of awkward corner of the hallway to set up in.

Another aspect of the exhibition was to bring food, and we brought skittles, and crazy flavoured chips. The different coloured skittles and flavours of chips represent new ideas and innovation. We also had to include an interactive game, which was where you pull a piece of paper out of a hat and you needed to use the supplies in front of you to make it. You had one minute to make something like a bird out of pipe cleaners, tooth picks, elastics and foam balls for example. It was to represent building and design.

After the Exhibiton

Overall I feel that the exhibition went really smoothly. It was never really busy or not busy enough. We were still constantly talking to people, and a lot of them told us that we had a really awesome idea that could be easily implemented. We told them of our plans to post some QR codes in Deep Cove that people could scan and it would take them to our playlists. I think that our project could definetly help disperse the amount of tourists in Deep Cove to the major points of interest and other places to reduce the busyness. I enjoyed this project a lot, as it was something I dealt with 5 days a week and impacts my life. Everyone in my group contributed equally and we all worked well together. I think that this project felt a little to easy though. I think that is some way we could have pushed ourselves a little more. I don’t know what that would be, but we definitely could have been more creative in our problem solving and maybe add to our solution even more. If I was to do this project again I would start off the project with more interviews and researching to really get a feel for our problem, and THEN building a solution. In conclusion, it was a great exhibition and I’m proud of the high quality work we produced as a group and it shows all the many skills we’ve learned in PLP in one project. We learned storytelling, keeping the audience engaged, podcasting, and researching all in PLP before and we’ve used that in our project firsthand. I have learned a lot and out a lot of good skills I had to the test, and am happy with our product once again.

 

Thats all,

See you