Field Schools

Going To The Second Most Polluted Place In America… For School

Sam

Because we are in PLP, we go on trips called field schools, where we get to go straight to where we are learning about to help our understanding and gain a more firsthand perspective. And this trip was to a site that was crucial to the development of the two atomic bombs made in the 1940’s. We went to Hanford Washington.

This trip would be the backbone of all the knowledge we acquire for this unit and project. I wrote another post about the learning we have acquired through this unit about the manhattan project. Be sure to check it out.

The Manhattan Project Project

But since we are talking about the trip in this post, let me give a little bit of explanation of what I learned on this trip first. Here are two main aspects of the Manhattan Project that we learned and wouldn’t have learned without going to the Hanford site:

1. The full scope of how big the Manhatttan Project site was.

I don’t think I really understood how big, physically, the Manhattan project actually was. It is occupies 586 square miles (1,518 km) which is roughly half of the size of Rhode Island. You can easily find this fact on Google, but I didn’t know what that looked like until we went there. For me at least, learning how large of a space they needed showed me the scope of how important this project was. On this site they had multiple buildings, all with different uses. There were pumphouses, water filtration buildings and multiple just straight up nuclear reactors. One thing that really stuck out to me was how spaced out everything was. The building and reactors were all really far apart, and I learned that’s because there were thousands upon thousands of temporary homes and trailers for the workers set up across the land during the time the site was in use. It really blew my mind how much land this site took up. It was a solid 45 minute drive from the tour bus headquarters to the reactors we saw up close!

2. The perspective of the American workers from Hanford.

I never really considered how much different the point of view of the Americans could really be than that of mine or other people not involved in the Manhattan project. For example, one of our tour docents, Joe, was explaining to another group how he is extremely happy that America decided to drop the atomic bombs, because if they hadn’t, his uncle would have had to go to war, with a good chance of never returning. Joe was moved to tears even now talking about how happy he is that his uncle was able to stay and didn’t have to go fight. This is something I never would have understood if I hadn’t been on this field school, and it’s really impacted me. I now see that Joe was only one case of millions of people in America that could have had the same experience with their own loved ones. This is something I vividly remember from this trip, and really helped me learn more about historical perspective.

 

Now, since we have covered what I learned about, let’s get into the fun stuff. The actual trip.

The fun stuff

Our main destination was Hanford Washington, but before that we had a few stops to make. We had a total of four days, and we would make the best of them. I think I’ll go about this post by explaining the best / my favourite parts of each day, and make them more detailed and explain what I learned because “Everything we do is for a reason.” – Ms. Willemse

So lets get into it shall we?

We first stopped in Portland Oregon, after driving all morning, (we left the school at 7:00 am) and arrived at Powell’s City Of Books. And a city of books it is, as it’s literally the largest new and used bookstore in the world. It takes up an entire block of downtown and we found out it holds approximately 1 million books, with 32,000 different categories. It’s so large it even has its own guided tours.

This was a pretty cool place to visit, as it’s kind of nostalgic to the days when I had time to read a lot, and a nice place to get out and stretch our legs. But, since we are in PLP, there’s an assignment involved. In a group of our friends, we needed to find a crazy book title, in this castle sized book store, and then using our bodies, imitate the title in a picture. This is what me, Robbie, Simon, and Spencer came up with:

The book title was: “A Brief History on the Worst Ways To Cure Everything.” In our photo, Robbie has a toothache, and so me and Spencer are punching him in the stomach to “make it feel better” and Simon is sitting on the floor poking his eye out with his finger… (we can’t remember why).

Anyways, lets get back on the road.

The next super interesting point of interest was Reed College. Here, we met with a student of the college, who is able to work the small Nuclear Reactor housed in the college itself, under 25 feet of water. This is the only nuclear reactor primarily operated by undergraduates. But these students don’t use it to make atomic bombs, they use it to test reactions between different types of metals and materials from the periodic table.

We weren’t allowed to take photos, but this is the exact reactor

We got to go in the “bunker-like” building on the campus that has been  home to the reactor since it was built in 1968. We needed to hang up our backpacks and jackets near the door, and then we entered the “control room” where two other students worked. They were about to boot up the reactor for us. We waited for a few minutes in the control room, and then entered the 20ft by 20ft room with a small pool in the middle surrounded by railings. We gathered around, and without anyone’s knowing, were about to witness a rare event. What we witnessed was a SCRAM, which is basically an emergency shutdown of the reactor. This was caused by the students in the control room booted the reactor up just a little too quickly. The reactor then automatically drops neutron-absorbing rods directly into the core of the reactor, cutting off any reactions going on inside. This only happens like ten times a year, and was a cool experience to be a part of. While we were there, I learned a lot about the reactor and how it works, and that technically, you could swim in the reactor pool, but it’s not recommended. This is because the radiation from the reactor is slowed down by the water so much that there’s barely any on the surface of the water. But still if you went down deep, you definitely wouldn’t feel good after. Overall this was a lot of fun and I found it really interesting.

 

 

 

The Manhattan Project Project

Sam

Well. We’re back.

Another year, another project, another blog post. So lets get into it.

This year what we started working on in PLP is a continuation of where we ended last year, with World War Two. And the main part of the war effort we focused on was in the United States of America. It is something both well known, and also very secretive to this day.

It is: the Manhattan Project. Our task was to create a short 5 minute film in groups of three or four describing 5 different facts about an aspect of the Manhattan project. We were to do lots of research and then use our highly developed script writing and video editing skills to create a peofessionalh looking video. I was in a group with Ethan and Parker. And this was our final product:

And if you want to find out the learning behind this, then keep reading and I’ll tell you all about it.

To kick off this unit, the first thing we did was really look into what the Manhattan project was. We all had a basic knowledge of the atomic bombs that were dropped on the Japanese at the end of WWII, but what we didn’t really know was how those bombs came to be. This, essentially, is the Manhattan project.

 

We needed to fully understand the ideas and goals of the Manhattan project to gain the historical perspective we needed in order to create our video. We studied the beginnings of the project, how America heard that Germany was developing their own atomic bomb research, and that America then jumped right into atomic research. There were three different sites that the American government needed for the atomic bomb creation. Each site needed to meet a specific set of criteria: they needed to be near a large source of water, have access to a lot of electricity and be in the middle of nowhere. The three sites were Hanford Washington, for the creation of the plutonium, Oak Ridge Tennessee was the home base and specialized in plutonium splitting, and finally Los Alamos, the site where they tested the bombs. This was the first bit of learning we did by reading articles and passages in different books, and conducting our own research. Something I found almost astounding was that the government just showed up one day to the farmers and families living on the Hanford area and said they had 30 days to pack up their stuff and leave. They were offered very little money for their property, and a lot of people were quite unhappy to leave their homes. Some went to court and fought for more house payment, and a few did succeed but it definetly wasn’t close to market value. This is a direct form of how the Manhattan project affected the lives of people near the project in any way. This was something I had a hard time picturing, but on the trip we did learn more in depth on that process. But, we still had a lot to learn before the trip begun.

Of course, we knew the final product of what was to happen. The bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 90,000–146,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000–80,000 people in Nagasaki. This was devastating. While studying more about the Manhattan project, we did a mini project to help us get a better historical perspective on the times of World War Two. To do this, we were split up into groups of three or four and tasked with creating a short video called a Newsreel. This was to be set as if it was showing in American theatres a few days after the bombing in 1945. This was something that was the norm at the time, because there weren’t any televisions, so people would get the news about the war when they went to see a movie in the local theatre. So, we needed to watch a few newsreels and then create our own using footage we find that supports a script we write. Here is ours:

I enjoyed making this video. I was the “lucky person” to do the voice over, and it needed to be in a specific style, as you can hear. I tried to match with the real newsreels of the time by talking fast and in short bursts. I even used a voice filter in GarageBand to make my voice sound like an old phone. I don’t think I nailed the accent, but other than that I was happy with our end result.

Another mini project we did was to look into one person that worked or was associated with the Manhattan project, and then create a character card for that person. This was so we could learn about all the different roles and responsibilities of the many many workers in the project. I decided to research a guy named Samuel Goudsmit, who was a physicist and the head of the top secret Alsos Mission.

His parents were Nazi concentration camp victims, but he was an aspiring physicist who ended up working for the American government. His job was to be on the Alsos Mission, a Mission that would be constantly watching, spying and monitoring the progress of the Germans attempts to create an atomic bomb. He even wrote a book about his experience where he says that the Germans were not close to having a working atomic bomb.

But let’s get back to the video. Before we even went on our trip we were to create a really rough draft of our video. Most of the footage would be us when we are on the trip, but in the rough draft we would just have our script recorded, background music ready, and indicate where different clips, interviews and photos would be. I think this stage actually helped me more than I thought at first because it really put what we were going to create into a product that I could see and visualize rather than just think about. I could figure out timing, and where ideal spots for interviews would be.

After this, we embarked on our trip. Four days in Oregon with 17 students and two teachers. It was a lot of fun, I have a post about it here if you would like to find out more about it.

And once we returned, we began editing and putting all the shots and even more knowledge we gained on the trip into our video. And after a few sets of peer and teacher critique, me, Ethan and Parker ended up with the video you saw at the top. I’m extremely happy with the end result, as I put a lot of hours of hard work into it, and I’m glad to see how it turned out. I actually tried a different app for this video other than regular iMovie, and it was awesome. It’s called EnlightVideoleap and you can get it on the App Store for free.

 

Well, that’s all for this post.

 

See you

The BC Tech Summit

Sam

Hi.

Since my class and I are in PLP we do a lot of different types of field trips, or field schools. We go on ones ranging from 10 day trips out of the country to one day excursions in the greater Vancouver area. And in our case, May 16th was a one day excursion.

We went to the BC Tech Summit Youth Innovation Day. This was located in the large Convention Center downtown Vancouver. Our class was extremely lucky to go as this event costs the public $999 per ticket. And since it was the youth day, there were a lot of other school groups there from all around.

This event featured all sorts of technology such as virtual reality, simulations, prototypes, robots, designs and much, much more. There were also multiple speakers such as the Honourable John Horgan, Brent Bushnell, David Katz and a few others. Another great feature at this event was the post secondary school booths that showed us students what their school had to offer. Overall the event was extremely interesting with some amazing technology, and amazing people.

But we didn’t go there to just have fun and wander aimlessly. We had a job to do.

1. Research Two Speakers

Before we embarked on the bus to get us to this event, we needed to do some research on two of the 5-6 speakers at the event. I chose my first speaker to be Brent Bushnell, and so I researched him beforehand, and took notes on his presentation while he was talking.

Brent Bushnell is a Los Angeles based entrepreneur, engineer, and CEO/co founder of Two Bit Circus, an experiential entertainment company. This company uses virtual reality to create entertainment for people that usually take the form of amusement parks. His tech is used to inspire kids about science, technology, engineering, art and math. Or in another form, S.T.E.A.M.  During his very inspirational talk, I got these main points. The world outside is changing and technology is at the heart of it. He said that 65% of children will have jobs that don’t exist now, meaning that technology will be disrupting our daily lives so much that the jobs we have now will be changed forever, and new ones will take over. This was just one of the many topics he spoke about. Brent Bushnell’s talk was my favourite out of them all since he talked a lot about how to be creative.

The other speaker I chose to research was Ryan Holmes, the CEO and Founder of Hootsuite, a social media management tool for businesses. This company, founded in Vancouver, is quickly becoming one of the many tech giants nowadays, at a value of around $1 Billion.

During Ryan Holmes’ interview on stage, he described his childhood to us, and it was interesting. Currently he is heavily involved in technology, but when he was a kid, his house in Vernon, BC, didn’t even have electricity to run a computer! Once he fell in love with coding on his elementary school library computers, he entered a competition and won a brand new Apple 2c computer. He could only run it off the battery of his moms car though. But something proven in his life story that applies to everyone today is that if you are really passionate about something and you are willing to pursue it fully, then there’s nothing that should stop you. He loved computers, and he didn’t let his lack of electricity stop him, and now he runs a big name company. At least that’s what I took away from his talk.

Onto to the next section.

2. Interview a Mentor

Another cool factor to this event was the brief 10 minute time frame we had to interview “mentors” sitting at tables in the main room. These were people attending the event that worked for businesses all over BC and came to represent their business. Me, adam, spencer, Kyle and Simon had the chance to interview a lady who worked at Lifelabs, a medical diagnostic service based in BC. These clinics provide patients with the opportunities to be tested for anything. Anyways, I made a short podcast on the answers she gave us.

(The podcast had some technical difficulties. Coming soon)

This was a cool experience and she gave us some good information, even in only 10 minutes.

3. Visit a Post Secondary School Booth

After we listened to all the speakers and mentors, we had a chance to walk around upstairs where all the booths with all the technology was set up. Our task for this step was to look into one of the post secondary recruitment booths that interested us. Naturally, I chose one that had a drone sitting in front of it. After some further explaining and questions, I found out that this booth was representing a mapping program in BCIT that utilizes drones to make detailed 3D maps. I found this very interesting how they were using normal drones to make complicated maps using a specific program. After this we were allowed to walk around and look at all the booths we wanted.

We started our day at Seycove at 7:00 am, and finished off when we got back at about 5:00 pm, so it was a long day. Oh, and we also had the option to make a “vlog” so me, Simon, Spencer, and Adam came up with this video:

(Video coming really soon in theatres near you)

Overall, this experience was a lot of fun and I actually learned a lot. I loved seeing all the creativity people had and pursued to actually make a product or design, and show it off at this convention. Brent Bushnells talk was definitely a highlight for me as he was very engaging and told us a lot about creativity. The positive and creative energy rubbed off on everyone, making the day very upbeat and fun. I didn’t know that this was a thing, and now that I’ve experienced it I’ll definitely consider returning next year.

 

Thats all for now,

See you

Technology is Causing a Rukus

Sam

What if I took away ALL your technology, from your dishwashers to cell phones to electric locks on your doors, and you had to live for a week without it.

Would you be able to do it?

Well, if you think you could then good for you.

But it wouldn’t be easy for everyone. Our 21st century lives rely on our technology for almost everything we do. Education, transportation, communication, and many more areas of our lives are full of technology, even if we don’t know it.

And that’s what our past unit has been all about.

Disruption

This unit was one that we have been looking st for a long time, and finished off with our amazing trip to California. Read this post to hear lots more about our trip. We went to three different cities in California and visited lots of major tech businesses such as Twitter,

Google,

Apple,

and Intel.

These big corporations are more present in our lives than ever in our day and age.

After returning from the trip we had a few projects to work on. One of them was a scrapbook type of digital book describing our trip and how it all relates to the theme of disruption, which you can read at the end of this post. Another was all about our time at High Tech High, which was in the form of an interview podcast, and I have a post on it here. And the next project was a partner project, and I worked with Isobel, and the project was a choice of a few formats, and a choice of a location.

Heres what our options were for formats:

And here’s what we could have done for location:

Me and Isobel decided to a video about High Tech High, because we instantly thought of a good thesis, and thought a video would be a great way to showcase how different High Tech High is. We filmed a lot when we were in California, more specifically High Tech High, and had lots of clips to work with for our video. But without any other talk about it, here is is below so you can watch it:

We created this video to show the main differences to our school Seycove and the PLP program we are in, to HTH and their crazy school.

The video production went smoothly other than a few technical difficulties with photo storage and iCloud, and we both did our parts well. Sometimes there was confusion as to who was doing what or how things should be done, and that is just bad communication on our parts, which can easily be improved for next time. Other than that, I’d say this video was a success and I’m happy with what we created.

But of course, as always in PLP, we aren’t done yet! We still needed to do one last thing on disruption… other than this post. We had to write

an essay.

Yeah, I know, it’s crazy. As if we didn’t already have like four projects. And at this time as well, Destination Imagination regionals are looming in the back of our minds, making us cry ourselves to sleep with stress, or in Ethan’s case, get a lisp from a swollen tongue.

(Which was caused by stress. It’s a real thing, look it up.)

But, anyways, back to the essay. The theme was about technological disruption, and the driving question being as follows:

How has technology acted as a disruption throughout history?

For our essay, since it’s a synthesis essay, we needed to use information from three different sources. One of them had to be from the book we read in class, Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. The other two were up to us. But anyways, I’ll show you the essay and then do the rest of my talking:

Cameras Are A Disruption
By Samuel Scheewe

 

Every single person in our world has encountered some type of technology in their life. Technology has grown so big and so diverse in our world, and it has completely re-shaped it. Technology is a disruption, and it is evident in the invention and modern development of the camera. It has changed our entertainment, personal lives, and privacy, all by one device.


Movies and TV shows are some of the most popular forms of entertainment. Almost every single person has been to a movie theatre at least once in their life, and these movies are there because of one thing. Cameras. Cameras are mounted on cars, planes, and drones for these professional films, and are the reason for the millions of dollars the industry makes every movie. An entertainment study by ISBSWorld in 2012 claimed that the movie and film entertainment industry reached $126.8 Billion, ranking it among the top 5 forms of entertainment our world has ever seen. The industry has only gotten bigger since then. People watch movies every day, and every year hundreds of new movies are made. And it all wouldn’t be possible without cameras. Before cameras and movies, people found other ways of entertainment. But since the recent development of the professional filming cameras, it has brought the film industry to the top, to the point where almost every household has one working television, and is used daily. Movies and TV shows are a very popular form of entertainment, as they are extremely addicting. It’s very easy to say, “Just one more show,” and keep watching. Filmmaking is all about keeping the attention of the audience, and that is all in captivating camera angles and gripping script writing. This has changed our entertainment from books to television because of the way that movies let us hear the story, see it, and follow our characters through an exciting adventure. The movie immerses us and lets us escape our world and join another for a short time. Cameras are the reason for this change from books to movies, and it’s because of this change people can watch and keep stories with them whether it’s an action movie, horror film, or nature documentary. 21st century entertainment is getting better and better, and the cameras behind those screens get better and better. These stories will be kept with our generation forever.


Cameras have become so small, that they have found a way into our own personal lives. They can go with us wherever we go, in our pocket. The camera was integrated into the smartphone, and this was revolutionary in that people didn’t need a separate camera if they wanted to take pictures anymore. Now, everyone had the power of photography at their fingertips, which was huge. A study on Altitudeinc about the iPhone camera as a disruption to digital cameras says: “It is a photographic experience designed for the masses and one that will quickly obsolete the need for a separate camera for most people.” And Altitudeinc is correct. Having HD photo and video capabilities already in your smartphone is a very quick design that is more appealing to the masses than having to lug around a different camera. And the cameras in our smartphones are dummy-proof. It’s a point and shoot type of idea, where the exposure and focus adjusts automatically, making it super easy for everyone to use. This has changed our world, and has let every single person with a smartphone be a photographer of their own lives, and can keep their memories as long as they want. Having a camera on our smartphones is something we take for granted. They effect social media, which is an extremely popular industry, and communication in general. Taking photos and sharing them with other people is what a smartphone does, and we wouldn’t be able to do that if none of the smartphones didn’t have cameras. The camera is one of the biggest functions of a modern day smartphone, and without it our personal social media and communication would be drastically different. Cameras have changed our personal lives for the better, making us all capable of keeping our own stories in our pockets.


Would you want someone watching you at all times? No, you probably wouldn’t. People want their privacy, and that’s your right. Security cameras have changed that. They aren’t able, or allowed, to watch you at all times, but they protect you in all the public places you go. Whenever you go out to the mall, or just walk around downtown, there are cameras on the outside of buildings. And they are there for one reason. To help prevent or discourage crime. This is another form of camera we take for granted. They have been a positive disruption to our daily life, as Reolink survey on the effectiveness of home security cameras informs us that 83% of burglars will not rob their target house or building if they can see security cameras. This is a big number. Having cameras constantly surveying the activity in public places is a vital help to police. But there also is a fine line between security purposes and controlling the freedom of people. This is clearly demonstrated in the book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, where the main character Marcus is being watched and controlled, but manages to fight back. This problem of too much control is always up for debate, but having security cameras still greatly decreases crime rates. And it wouldn’t be possible if not for the camera. It has truly changed our world as we now it.


The camera was once used only for professional filmmakers, and was big, heavy and only shot in black and white. But with the modern developments, it has changed the way we live in multiple areas of our life. Cameras brought a $126.8 billion entertainment industry to life, impacted the way we share and document our personal lives, and have prevented and protected us from crime. All of these areas of our lives are ones we see every single day. Without the new technology of cameras disrupting our world for the better, we would live extremely different lives.

 

I found that for most of the essays I’ve written, I’m pretty confident going into them as I’m good at writing. But for this essay, with all our other work going on, I felt I was less prepared. It took me a while to come up with my thesis, and I didn’t finish my actual outline until after I wrote the essay. Which isn’t good, in case you’re wondering.

But, I think that for all my unpreparedness, I did pretty well. I found my two other sources, and I think they supported my points really well. My main idea was that cameras are changing our lives worldwide for the better. They are going from big machines, to something that can fit in your pocket, or fly hundreds of feet in the air on a drone. I think that this essay explains and supports what I’m saying. The day or two before the essay I was preparing as much as I could, brainstorming ideas and such. But I feel that I don’t really need to do that much preparing other than an outline to get my ideas down. I felt fairly confident beforehand, and I feel confident in my product.

Overall, this has been my favourite unit in a long time. I really enjoyed hearing about how all the businesses we know today started out as small as three guys in a garage. It really interested me how they though of something totally crazy and different and kept going with it until they changed the world. That was quite inspiring.

And then we went on and actually experienced all these businesses and organizations in real life, while being on an incredibly fun trip with my good friends, and it was absolutely incredible. I will remember this trip for the rest of my life, and all the things I’ve learned as well. I’m very glad I took this opportunity and went with my classmates this year, because it was something to remember.

This unit has been amazing, fun and tough at the same time, and I’m actually sad to see it go. But I can only imagine how the next projects and assignments will be after this great one.

Thanks for reading,

See you.

 

Going to School… On Vacation

Sam

On our week long trip to the sunny state of California, we had the chance to do something you won’t believe…

We went to school. For two days.

But this school isn’t a normal one. It’s located in downtown San Diego, California. It’s called High Tech High, a pretty well known and controversial school in that area.

We visited this school, and got to shadow a grade 9 class for the entirety of two of their school days. We met with a teacher, Mrs. Anna, who Ms. Willemse and Mr. Hughes have known and met with for a few years, and she and her students explained how their school works. We were taken on a tour of the school by some of the students there. Here are some photos of the schools:

I was really impressed with how different this school was. From the architecture to the curriculum, High Tech High is unique. When we first arrived there, we didn’t really know how the school worked, but after we got the tour of the campus, we started to learn a bit more. Once we had our tour, we met with our partners.

But before this, before we left on the trip we had to make videos describing ourselves and our interests. I went through three drafts, and I was extremely happy with my final draft:

This was so that we could be partnered up with HTH students that are similar in personality with us. So, when we entered HTH we began meeting our partners.

But, I was a little disappointed.

As sad as it was, it seemed like everyone got their own partner except for me, Calum and Alex. We had to join with any of our friends, and so I joined forces with Robbie, and his two HTH partners Max and Daniel. They were pretty cool guys, they were mostly quiet and reserv3d but they knew a lot about their school and were very smart. Me and Robbie followed them to all their classes for the two days, and their classes were very different.

From my understanding, the students had four periods in the day. And it’s the same thing for a whole term, everyday. They had a humanities classroom, math, media arts, and the outdoor basketball court. Their schools didn’t have a cafeteria, library, gym, computer room, or even lockers.

The reason the school is like this is because the type of learning is PBL, or project based learning, just like in our program PLP. Except their whole school is PBL. The aim of this school is to prepare the students for the real world after high school by working on projects that are less like traditional schools where you memorize facts from textbooks. The students use a variety of materials to create those amazing projects, like paper, wood, metal, or digitally, and they are all very well done. The materials the students need are made ready for them when they need them because the staff really wants the students to let their creativity and ingenuity thrive in what they are creating. This is the goal of High Tech High and project based learning.

One of the things I noticed that I thought was pretty cool was that the walls weren’t covered with lockers, but covered in the projects of all the students. From the elementary school to the grade 12’s, their projects were being showcased for anyone to see. This made each and every area of the school different, and very interesting to walk through.

This was the High Tech High Media Arts building, the one where we tagged along in a class. The entrance is on the right side of the long T-shape, and the clsssrooms are all over. There are three floors, the bottom for the elementary, middle for middle school, and top for the high school.

At one point in the day, I got the chance to interview two of the students in the HTH class about their experiences and daily lives at their unique school. I asked them about what they like and don’t like, and how their school works. Here it is below:

Overall, my HTH experience was pretty cool. I got to see firsthand how an entire school is making an effort to make change in the education systems in their community, and eventually, hopefully, worldwide. I liked seeing all the projects the students have done, and how the school functions in general. The students all were really nice and welcoming, and they were laid back but worked very hard. I was interested in seeing all the differences and also similarities between PLP and HTH. This whole experience was really educational and it showed me that there are more ways than just one to learn.

 

See you

Californiaaa Knows How to Party

Sam

Wow.

 

That was an awesome trip. From February 2-11, my grade 10 PLP class was in the beautiful state of California!

We went to San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco, and in that order. This post isn’t going to be filled with school-talk, I’m going to tell you all about the best parts of our trip.

But first, let me tell you why we went on this trip. Our whole theme this year has been around the word Disruption. How are things in our daily lives a disruption, or were a disruption. We have been looking at how technology is a disruption, and what better place to go see it in real life than Silicon Valley, a land of technological innovation! But we wouldn’t just go there. We went to two other cities, and many more amazing locations.

So, let’s get right into it.

First, we flew from Vancouver to Seattle, and then all the way down to San Diego. Once we landed there we went right to Torrey Pines Natural Reserve. It was a beautiful park on a peninsula dedicated to preserving the last known Torrey pine trees in North America.

Next we went to La Jolla cove, an amazing beach with lots of seals and sea lions. We played frisbee in the warm air while the sun set over the horizon.

The next day we went to the San Diego Safari Park. I was amazed at just how big it is, and the variety of animals they are able to keep there because of the climate. We got to see all kinds of animals ranging from birds to rhinos. We spent the majority of the day there, and I’m glad we did.

One of the highlights I have of the Safari Park is getting to see the Cheetah Run. They had a grass track, and got the cheetah to chase a stuffed animal on a tow rope down it at top speed! Here’s the video:

That was the end of day 2. On day three, we got to board a massive decommissioned turned museum aircraft carrier, called the USS Midway. Again, we spent most of the day here, and again, I’m happy we did. There was a lot to see, and you could pretty much go anywhere on the ship. My favourite part was the flight deck, and learning about how they launch the fighter jets.

For the next two days, we were shadowing another class in their school. Their school is an American charter school called High Tech High (HTH). I talk all about this part of the trip here (coming soon).

 

Right after our second day at HTH, we caught a plane to San Jose. We then visited the Intel museum, and we learned about how the company came to be, and what it does. I learned a lot more about how complicated computer chips can be! That evening, we got to talk with Scott, a man who was on the original iPhone creation team, and Brendan, a software designer that has worked for IBM, and now is working for Amazon. They gave us a lot of great information that ties directly into our unit of Disruption. They talked to us about how Silicon Valley is the heart of innovation, and that it’s not all big ideas working all the time. They said that some make it, and some do, and that’s the way it is, and the mindset is to just keep trying. This is similar to our Blue Sky projects, in how we design a product that solves a problem. Except we aren’t trying to get thousand dollar investments. But overall, they were very interesting and I will take away a lot from that one hour and a half session.

Day six. In the morning, we visited Googleplex. The official HQ of Google, something we all know and love. I was a little dissapointed that we didn’t get to go in any of the buildings, but it still was cool to see the campus and the people.

Next we went to the Apple Visitor centre, across the street from the Apple Infinite Loop building. This visitor centre had some crazy architecture. From curved panes of glass to freestanding marble staircases, this place had it all. And it had a bunch of Apple products you can’t buy anywhere else in the world. Pretty cool place.

And to finish off our day in Silicon Valley, we gave a quick visit to the Intel Museum. This place was pretty small, but had a lot of computer chip information. To me it wasn’t incredibly interesting since I didn’t know what a wafer was…

The next morning we spent at the Computer History Museum. This was really cool because the way it was laid out was you would walk through the museum and the computers slowly got newer and newer. The museum took you through the entire history of computers, from the ones the size of a room, to the Apple 2. I’m not super interested in computers or programming, but I actually found this museum interesting. I liked seeing how each computer got better and better, building off the old model, and other people’s ideas to stay at the top of the market. It’s crazy to me to think of how an ipad will be outdated in 15 years, and I use mine every day.

Next we stopped at the famous HP garage, where the computer company HP all began. There’s not really much to see, it’s just a shed with a green door…

And next, we visited Stanford. This is what I was picturing: a very professional, strict looking school where only geniuses get accepted. What I saw: normal looking students wearing casual clothes ripping around campus on longboards and bicycles. I was surprised, in a good way. The students were all very smart, and I learned that the acceptance policy is to look at who you are as a person and what you’ve done in your community, not just your grades. This changed my whole view on the school and I definitely consider it a possibility in my future.

Now, we didn’t take a plane, or a car, or a bus. We took a train to San Francisco! I thought this was pretty cool. On the trip we took pretty much all the major forms of transportation. We found ourselves on foot, in cars, buses, cable cars, trains, boats, and planes!

But, anyways. In San Francisco we visited Twitter headquarters, which was pretty amazing to see. We saw  how Twitter works, all the crazy cool rooms, and the daily life of an employee.

Then we went to the Golden Gate Bridge. This experience was pretty surreal. When we walked around and took pictures, the bridge seemed fake. It literally looked like it was a backdrop for a movie. It was pretty amazing with the sun setting behind it.

And now. The best part of the whole trip, in my opinion. On the very last full day, we got to see Alcatraz. But before that we went on a pretty cool walking  tour of San Francisco. Wild Wes (that’s his name) took us to all the historical places in SF, and he had a pretty great route since everywhere we went had some historic traits. I learned a lot about how cities have more history other than just who founded it and built it up.

And now, yes, it’s time for Alcatraz. I was quite excited to be able to actually go in a famous prison. On an island.

First, we took a 20 minute ferry out to the island.

Then we walked up the hill together to get to the main cellhouse, and turned on our audio tour skills (there’s not that many). I though the audio tour was awesome. It was perfectly timed with how fast you move through the cell house, and gave some pretty cool information all the while. The coolest story to me was the escape. Three men dug a hole in the wall, climbed onto the roof, slid down, jumped into the ocean, and were never seen again, to this day!

I really enjoyed the entire trip, even with a little sleep deprivation. I would say that my second favourite part of the trip was just having fun with everyone else. Everyone was having a great time, and I got to know a lot of people better. This type of trip I will remember for the rest of my life, and I would never be able to have these experiences if it wasn’t for PLP. I learned so much in just over a week, and I’ll be able to use that knowledge in everything I do. That’s why I see these trips as so valuable. You get to goof around with your friends, while having once in a lifetime experiences. It really was a great time, and I am glad I went.

Heres a book I made about our trip, and how everywhere we went related to our theme of Disruption. Check it out for more photos and other content from the trip:

 

Camp-ilano

Sam

To begin this school year, our teachers organized a one night getaway for us PLP 10 students, to get us working hard as a team right away in the year. We went to a small camp only a 20 minute drive away called Camp Capilano, and it was a small building with a dining room, common area with couches, and two large rooms with bunks, one for the guys and one for the girls. And there was a pool, which was very important. We worked on a three projects while we were there.


Our first project wasn’t filmed at Camp Capilano, we stopped at an outdoor park by a dam near the camp to work. It was an outdoor area with multiple viable locations to film. This project was inspired by Master Chef, Amazing Race or Big Brother and their intros that introduce all the contestants. We watched those intros and looked to see the different personalities of the different people earlier that day. Then we made our own intro that had to introduce different people, but we weren’t allowed to use dialogue. We were in groups though, and we had to act out 10 different characters that had distinct personalities. We only had one hour to make the entire video, so once the starting gun fired, my group of five got right down to work.

We first thought of the different personalities we wanted to portray, and then planned how we would show that in a short clip without talking. It was difficult because we really needed to think on how the viewer will be able to compare each character to the next, and see how they’re different. Anyways, our theme would be a wilderness survival show, and we titled it “The Wilderness Games.” Our characters would be participating in this event. Anyways, what we came up with is this:

After watching it, with only 10 minutes left in our allotted time, we realized we should’ve:
• Made our clips a bit longer for each person
• Really broken down what we wanted to portray and focus on that one small thing better
• Transitioned between characters better

But, we were happy with what we got, and it was a good start.

That afternoon, after a great lunch, we then were assigned another project. This one was assigned when we had arrived at Camp Capilano. The main idea: the same thing we just did with the TV show intros except only audio. No visuals. Only us recording our voice. We got into our same groups and got planning.

Since there we couldn’t film and show personalities physically, we needed to think very carefully about what we put in the script. We got to work planning out the 10 different characters which were mostly the same as before, but we changed a few people that were easier to portray through voice. Our main idea for this task was still the Wilderness Games, but now you were hearing a reporter ask all the contestants what they think their biggest strength will be in the Games. First we wrote a script, and as we went through it, we made the necessary changes. Then we were ready to record. We went through and each did two different people, and then once we recorded all of it in iMovie, we did a little bit of editing like cutting the clips, or reorganizing the order of them. Then we got our final product:

That one was fun to make, yet required careful planning and thinking to pull it off right. Then we had free time. We swam in the pool for an hour or so, and it was lots of fun. It wasn’t super deep and it didn’t have a diving board, but we had chicken fights and breath holding contests and stuff like that which made it fun.

Then there was dinner, and then we watched the projects we already did. They were really fun to watch/listen to. Everyone tackled the assignment differently, and it gave everyone ideas on how they could’ve done it a little differently, or ideas for next time.
Then the final project was given to us. We had to find different groups, and so I ended up with Simon and Spencer. We then had to make a 4:00 podcast (audio only story) that was on the topic of identity. We needed a story that talked about our identity and how it affected or portrayed our identity. Oh boy.
By the way, this project was introduced to us at around 7:00 pm that night, and it was due at 10:00am the next morning…
So we had to get cracking


Spencer Simon and I thought for a while and were having trouble coming up with something. Our only idea was this one time we were maintaining an area of Dirt Jumps for mountain bikes, and one time when we did a lot of work in particular, I ended up crashing face first into a log on the ground really hard. Then the next time we went there, we noticed that there were other bikers there, and we were happy.

We thought this story was a good idea because it shows that we like mountain biking, and we will build trails in our community to help it, just for fun and we keep going even when we crash. We pitched this idea to our three teachers, Mr. Hughes, Miss Willemse and Miss Maxwell. They thought our story was great, but to leave out the part where I crashed, or at least don’t make it the main part of our story. This is because the smaller of the event we chose to talk about the better, because we could really break it down. We agreed and got to work. This was between 8:30-9:00. We began our script writing, which was hard when your brain is fried and it’s getting late…


But then we began second guessing our decision on our story, which really, really, slowed us down to the point where we stopped and asked the teachers which idea to go through with because at that point we’d thought of two more. They listened to our new ones and told us to fully commit to our first one, which they thought was the best. And so we did. This was definitely past 10:00, probably later.
We wanted to just skip the script writing process, but we didn’t know what we were saying it so it wasn’t as strong as if we did have a script. So then we began slowly began wiring bit by bit on the script. This almost drove us insane. It was probably 11:45 or later, and we’d barely got anything done. All three of us were cranky and tired, and kept getting off track. This went on till about 1:00-1:30am when the teachers told us we all need to stop and go to sleep. Relieved, we dragged ourselves off the couches and went to sleep. We’d managed to get most of the script done, so when we woke up at 7:00 the next morning, we finished our recordings, ran through it, and were happy. Then the fun part. Listening to everyone else’s. I liked hearing all the different stories and sometimes funny, sometimes serious interviews in each podcast. One podcast was actually all about Kyle’s hair…

Anyways, here it is:

This project is really fun, and taught us a lot without us even realizing it. We learned about personalities, how to analyze them, portray them through visuals and audio, telling a good and interesting story, and lots more I haven’t thought of. Overall it was an awesome trip where we all got to know one another better, and had lots of fun.

Thanks,
See you

 

 

Florida Films From February

Sam

Hello,

In this post I will be talking about a big project we have been working on. This assignment was given to us in February when our PLP 9 class went to Florida for 10 days. This is the Making Fantasy Real Video. How it all started was we first got to choose a ride in Disney world that we would research and in a 5 minute video explain how this ride draws us in to the the imaginary world of that ride. The ride that was chosen by each person, had to be ridden by that person because the class would be going to Disney world. My ride choice was the Indiana Jones Adventure ride in Disneyland California.

Me and four other students wouldn’t be making the trip to Florida because of various reasons, so we got to choose rides anywhere, since we didn’t have to ride them. So when the majority of the class went to Florida, we stayed at school and worked on this project and our Destination Imagination projects. Away they went, and here we stayed.

So, the only thing to do to start, I started researching my ride. Once I had a good amount of research I put together a storyboard for my video. Here it is below:
It wasn’t set in stone, we could change if we needed, and I did stick to most of that plan. The next thing I did was to start filming and putting my clips together. Since I couldn’t ride my ride I needed to borrow some clips, but I worked with what I had. Once I got it all together I had my first draft, which is below:

In this video I had a lot of long clips where it was just me talking, so I saw how it got boring fast. I needed to change that, and make it more exciting. At this stage we did some peer critique, which is where another classmate gives feedback on our work. Here is what Claire said about my video in a critique sheet:

So after this feedback, I realized I needed to talk about the history of my ride, and why it was so popular. I got to work shortening the boring clips and filming about the history. After that it produced a second draft:

In this video I still needed to shorten the shots of me, and the shots of the ride because I needed to keep it tight to the points in order to keep the viewers interest. So after all of this it was time to do my third draft which looks like this:

This video has all the edits I’ve been asked to change, and so I was happy with this one, but of course we needed to do one last one for it to be ready to show the world, as our teacher says. The one last thing I was asked to do is to balance the audio, because at some points it’s quiet and at some points it’s louder. So I did that and here is my last draft (it’s the exact same video as the last one but with balanced audio):

And after all that I was finally approved to be ready. And here I am now, showing it to the world. This project was very fun to do, since we get to make a video, but I do wish I was able to go to Florida and film for my video myself.