Introduction:

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another Humanities blog. And this one is quite interesting. WWI, thats what this project was all about. I’m sure most of us know about WWI, its possibly one of the most brutal wars to ever be fought. Doing this project really opened my mind to how devastating wars can get, and we really did go into the details of this war. Now WWI had many different battles, and we were each assigned to make a comic book, with a story spine, explaining what our war was all about. I chose the battle of Festubert. Now we needed to draw pictures, and as it turns out there isn’t many visual examples of what the battle actually looked like. Therefore what may be in the comic might not actually be what it looks like in real life, though I did my best to re-create the scenarios these soldiers faced. 

The Project:

Lets move right into my comic. Now writing a comic is no easy task, it can either be rushed, or it can be constructed properly. I feel when we were making our comics, it was the perfect mix of rushing, and constructing. We first started off with our research. Researching my topic was hard, as there isn’t many sources or photos of the battle. After our research was gathered, we needed to implement our research into a story spine. Our spine needed to have valid dates, times, places, people, and it needed to include at least 1 fictional character. Now that you know our requirements, lets move onto our actual comic and my evidence of my learning. 

Now in my opinion, our story spine was the hardest part, now the reason I say this, is because as it turned out, its really hard to include so much information and evidence into a single comic book. Its hard to take historical information, and twist it into a story that makes sense. My comic had some criticism about it not having a clear beginning, middle, and end. And I agree, its not clear, and I feel I could have done better when it come to the storyboard. But overall I am proud of my comic. 

My Comic:

Now enough talk. Lets take a look at my comic book, The Battle Of Festubert.

Did you read it through? If so, I would love for you to tell me what you think in the comments below, I’m always open to constructive criticism. 

Driving Question:

As with every blog I’ve done, I explain what the driving question is, and how it’s designed to “drive” our project forward. Usually we have Milestones, but this year our projects are structured without Milestones, and I actually like it better this way. Now, our driving question for this project was, “How might we use graphic novels to understand Canada’s involvement in WWI?” As most of us know, graphic novels, or comic books, tend to be full of information. Comics about war are some of the most fun and interesting comic books to date. For example, one of my favourite comics is Louie Riel, the battles that take place in that book are utterly horrifying, but they bring up great points, and is genuinely a fun read. If we implement characters, places, extreme details into our comic, we can understand Canadas involvement in WWI in a fun, and detailed way. As long as we include interesting scenarios, details, facts, places, people, and times, we can easily create an historically accurate Graphic Novel showing Canadas involvement in WWI.  

Conclusion:

Finally, my conclusion. A lot of the facts brought up in this project will probably stick with me for the rest of my life. This project was full of gruesome facts that brought up interesting points and facts that are horrifying to think about, it shows how brutal trench warfare can be. If you want to learn more about WWI consider watching 1917, it will give you a taste of what it was like. Thanks for checking out my blog, see you later.

Quote of the day: 

“Do or do not, there is no try”

-Yoda

Introduction:

Hello everyone welcome back to another blog, today I will be talking about our latest PLP project in Maker: Believe In Good. As with every PLP project we do, we have a driving question, the question is the thing our project revolves around. Our driving question for this project was a little bit different as we had more than one. Our driving questions for this project were: How might I use technology to construct knowledge? How might I use technology to create and communicate?  Now, since this project is different, the layout of this blog will be different because there are no Milestones to talk about. Before we move on I should explain to you what this project is about, The 7 Habits. Our project mainly focused on the book, The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Teens by Sean Covey. We needed to use the Habits from the book and include them into our project. What I mean by this is with every habit we did, we had to fill out a workbook containing vital information that would later help us explain to the teachers how we felt we did in this project. Along with every workbook, we had to complete a creative activity, this could be visual, physical, ect. It had to show our understanding of the habit we just finished. Now that you know what our project was about, let’s move onto the details.

Driving Questions:

Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to construct knowledge? 

“You seek to much information, and not enough transformation”

-Sai Baba

Technology is everything, so many answers to so many questions can be discovered over search engines like Google, Firefox, Bing, Edge, Safari, and even social media communities like Reddit, and Discord, and many others. People are willing to answer any question you have online. Unfortunately the immediate access to information isn’t always a good thing. Fact and opinion are very blurred when it comes to the information you find online. This is where critical thinking comes into play, like trusted sources. Constructing knowledge requires using technology wisely. 

Creative Communicator: How might I use technology to create and communicate? 

“It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.”

-Steve Jobs, Co-founder of Apple.

I can use technology to create graphic designs with platforms like, Canva, Photoshop, and also game developing on platforms like Minecraft, Roblox, and so much more. Many of these projects can be shared through various platforms like the ones mentioned above with others to collaborate and build on. Even devices like the Apple Pencil, it’s not just the screen, you can now use a physical object to create something completely different and special. Technology helps us to communicate globally, you can meet people from all over the world with different stories to tell, different experiences to share. Platforms like zoom, and FaceTime, can help us collaborate and create effectively.

My Habits: 

To show I have a complete understanding of Communication, Personal and Social, and Thinking, we were assigned to do one of the following activity’s for each, Kinesthetic, Visual, and Audio. For Communication I chose to write out instructions to build something out of Lego to show clarity of communication. For Thinking I chose to set up a visual organizer, like a mind-map, a calendar, colour coating things to represent the importance. Finally, for Personal and Social I chose to make a short podcast explaining the habits I chose, and how they connect to Personal and Social, and how we can build relationships, and get to know people better. Lets start off with Thinking, here is a photo of my things calendar, As you can see, I had a few things overdue, I feel if I continue to set reminders and colour coat things, I can get better at getting things in on time! Lets move onto Personal and Social, now this one was quite challenging, as I needed to write a full script with a guest, now please note, this is my first time doing a podcast. Here is my FIRST podcast,

Finally, my Kinesthetic idea. This connected to Communication, and like I said before I chose to write out visual instructions on how to build an iPad out of lego, here is my instructions,

And thats it!

Conclusion:

The overall driving question for this project was, How can I be my most effective self? I feel I got so much out of this project I learned more about myself and my collaboration style with my peers as well as learning how to better communicate with people. This project encouraged me to look at the big picture of learning and my place within it. See you in the next blog.

Introduction:

Hello everyone, welcome back to another Scimatics blog. Today we will be talking about our newest Scimatics project, metaphor machines. Today will be a shorter blog as per the new blog guidelines for Scimatics, so I’ll try to keep this short. Our driving question for our project was: INS. For our project we were assigned into groups, in my group I had 4 people, Mateo, Max, Cole, and Me. For our project we needed to create a Rube-Goldberg style metaphor machine where hand crafted series and parallel circuits are part of the machine. We needed to use scale diagrams to serve as the plan for the group collaboration.  Accurate measurements of dimensions and circuit variables are assessed. Today we are not going to discuss Milestones, we are going to jump right into our competencies. 

Old Mindmap:

Updated Mindmap:

Curricular Competencies:

Questioning and Predicting:

At the start of this project, I was very distracted about things on my iPad on things my peers were doing. I was not interested in this project at first sight, and I didn’t give it my all. I feel overall I would grade myself as Developing on this competency, mainly for these reasons. I had occasional distractions on my iPad, I wasn’t focused most of the time, and finally I wouldn’t put all effort into work. To sum things up, overall I feel I could improve on this part of learning in general by setting reminders or to set notes to remind me what is really important, this way I can stay on task and do my work instead of procrastinating.

Reasoning and Analyzing:

For this competency, I overall feel I was distracted, just like the last competency. I didn’t put much effort into my blueprint at all, and I overall feel I could have done a much better job if given the chance. In general, I should have looked at the basecamp document more, that way I would get a better understating in general of what to do.

Planning and Conducting:

Once again, I did not put my full effort into this competency. I feel I could have done a lot better in once again, pushing myself, reminding myself, and working together. I would give my self a developing for this competency for missing the voltage, current, and resistance values in the blueprint. Overall, I feel I should have stopping playing games in class, this would help me with focusing and overall the amount of effort I put into my work.

Scientific Communication:

Our final competency is graded on how well we did on our machine and video. And overall I’m proud of how the machine worked out, it followed all the correct criteria for this project, and I would end up saying this would be a win, except for one little detail. In our video presentation for the machine we built, we didn’t do the voice over part, which ended up getting us a lower grade. I overall feel I could have reminded my peers to get the voice over done, that way we would have actually included our voice over.

Conclusion:

In conclusion to this project, I would say overall I did an accomplished job. We ended up building what we were asked to, we used all the scientific principles and followed all the project guidelines. Even though this project was hard, it was fun to collaborate with people I don’t know very well. Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll see you in the next one. 

Introduction:

Hello and welcome back to another blog. Today’s blog is different, but kinda the same. This year we once again, had the dreaded Destination Imagination. Ask anyone and they will tell you how hard and draining this area of learning is, but I need to clarify, it was worth it. Lets jump right into Destination Imagination. If you have read any of my blogs, you will know that I have already done a project on DI. To recap, I had Science for my challenge in Destination Imagination last year, and each year we get a different challenge element. This year me and my team members had Technical as our challenge element. I was originally in a different team at the start of the year, but after requesting to switch teams (Because of how off-task they were being) I finally got into a group I feel I could collaborate with. Before I continue, let me explain what Destination Imagination is in case your new here. Destination Imagination is a hands-on, project-based educational experience that encourages creativity, collaboration, communication and critical thinking skills. Each year seven new STEAM Challenges are created by our teams of content experts and educators to help students from K to Grade 12 learn HOW to think, not WHAT to think. Destination Imagination applies the creative process to help student teams create their own unique solutions to the requirements posed by the Challenges. Yes thats from their website that you can find HERE. We have a main challenge and an insta challenge, the main challenge we find out right away, but the insta challenge is something we have no idea about. So every year we prepare and “train” for the insta challenge while creating a solution to our main challenge. Sadly I’m not allowed to tell you about our insta challenge due to the rules, but I am allowed to explain our creative process to our main challenge. Lets begin. 

Creative Process:

Lets start at the beginning. November 2021, we were assigned to our groups. My group consisted of 7 peers. Dana, Alfie, Declan, Ben, Makenna, and Me. We started work on January, around this time we found out what our main challenge is. For our main challenge, we needed to make 2 hazards, 1 electrical device (to overcome 1 of 2 hazards), and 1 non-electrical device to overcome the other hazard (they can also overcome both hazards). We also needed to embed our hazards and devices in a daring escape story. Our story was about 2 robbers, that rob a bank in Nebraska 1964 to pay for rent and divorce fees. They need to overcome 2 hazards, one hazard is a tunnel, and one is a spike strip. They need to overcome these hazards by using our electrical device named The Money Mobile, which would carry the money from the vault onto our second device, our pulley system. The Money Mobile would transfer money onto the pulley and it would be pulled across the hazards. Then the money mobile would attempt to cross the hazards as well. Once they cross, a tripwire ends up being tripped, and they are arrested due to them being caught. Me and my friend Alfie would be playing music as our team choice element, I would be playing drums, and Alfie would play bass. That pretty much sums up our whole story.

Driving Question:

As with every project we do in PLP, we always have a driving question, this project was no exception. Our driving question for our project this year was, “How might we learn and experience the creative process while developing our creativity, curiosity, and courage?” This was quite a hard question to answer, and it brought up some good points. Now my answer to the driving question, “How might we learn and experience the creative process while developing our creativity, curiosity, and courage?” Well, I feel being a leader can really help contribute, like calling special meetings just for generating ideas and options, providing feedback on new ideas, promoting your team members ideas to others, asking a lot of questions, and finally accepting and promoting different perspectives.

Video:
Now, I can show you my main challenge video, but I can’t talk to you about my insta challenge as said before. Here is my challenge video, enjoy:

Conclusion:

In conclusion to this overwhelmingly stressful project, I learned a lot of valuable lessons. I learned how to collaborate, work effectively, be a leader, and be a team player. Most of us contributed to Destination Imagination and some of us didn’t. But that doesn’t matter now, lessons have been learned and I can confidently say, I am looking forward to DI next year. Even though DI is so draining, it is worth it in the end. Thanks for stopping by, see you in the next blog.  

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Introduction:

Hello and welcome back to another blog. Humanities time once again. This was a big project therefore it contains tons of information. Before we get onto our Milestones, let me introduce our driving question for this project, “How can an understanding of nationalism of the past, help us make sense of today?” As said in the driving question, this project was all about nationalism, and we each got a topic to write about during our time in class. My topic was Louis Riel, never heard of him? Well, Louis Riel was a Canadian politician, a founder of the province of Manitoba, and a political leader of the Métis people. He led two resistance movements against the Government of Canada and its first prime minister, John A. Macdonald. Personally, I think he is considered a Hero. But some people would care to disagree with me. Whatever your opinion is, let me know in the comments and ill do my best to answer most of them. Realistically, this project did not have Milestones clearly laid out in-front of us, so I’ll do my best to guess what could possibly be a Milestone. So without further ado, lets move onto our Milestones, 

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Milestone 1, Welcome to the very start of the project. For MS1 we needed to do our Confederation Simulation reflection. Now at the start of the project we had to do a simulation that explained the different parts of a revolution, as well as nationalism, we where assigned to groups of 3 or more. We where assigned to represent the follow provinces, Canada east, Canada west, New Brunswick, PEI, ect. I was assigned to be apart of New Brunswick. I feel I could have spent a little more time on this Milestone as I handed it in late, and I overall feel I could have done a better job in general. Personally I think for next time I should stay on task more, as I got a bit distracted with side-chatter. Overall though I would personally grade this Milestone as accomplished. Feel free to look at the reflection,

Time for Milestone 2. Now, for Milestone 2 our next Milestone was our topic research. As I said before we needed to pick a person to write about, who had something to do with nationalism. I picked Louis Riel as my topic mostly because I know who he is and what he did before we even started this project. I really believe this helped me with my learning, as I already understood the important parts of his history. I feel I could have done a little bit more research, as I didn’t quite meet the criteria for this Milestone. Overall I could have done better, and I should have gotten to work on that Milestone as soon as I came home from school. (This kinda ties into what where doing in Maker right now but more on that later) Anyway, feel free to check out my research about Louis Riel as I do think it might be one of the more important Milestones out there.

Welcome to Milestone 3, the halfway point for the project. For Milestone 3 we needed to make our 3 images. Now if I haven’t told you already, our main goal for this project was to make an instagram post representing our chosen topic. As you know mine was Louis Riel. For every topic we needed to make 1 written-on image, a quote image, and for the last image we could basically do whatever we wanted to. Here is my quote image that I made,

Now onto Milestone 4, MS4 connects a lot with Milestone 3, we needed to choose our final image. Now we were in groups of 3 or more for this part of learning. So we each collaborated with each-other to pick our final 3 images. We decided mine would be best for the quote, Coal’s written-on image would be good, and Nolans creative image would be good. That pretty much sums up Milestone 4. 

Milestone 5 time, our last Milestone. For Milestone 5 we were asked to make our final post caption. Now our caption was the thing to put our images and research into context. The reader would be using the caption to figure out who Louis Riel was and how he connected to nationalism. Overall this section of learning went great. Me and my fellow peers worked collaboratively and effectively together to make what we would say, an accomplished caption.   

Finally, the blog post, Milestone 6, not really a Milestone but I decided to include it anyway. As you can probably tell by now, this is my blog. Feel free to grade my work on Milestone 6 in the comments. I would be glad to have your feedback on what I should improve on!

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Opinion Piece:

(My personal opinion on Louis Riel)

Louis Riel, many would say he is an idol, and some would call him a monster. My judgment is strictly based on what I have observed in my lifetime. Louis Riel, in my viewpoint, is a hero and will always be the true founder of Winnipeg. Let’s go back in time. Louis Riel was born on October 22, 1844. The Metis people were struggling to keep their land rights around this time, and as Louis Riel grew up, he began to get into politics. In my opinion, when Louis Riel started his government with the British, it was a love, hate relationship. For example, the Métis National Committee declared a provisional government on December 8, with Riel ultimately becoming its president on December 27. The British wanted to join Canada as a confederation, but Louis Riel voted against it. This struck up a disagreement and eventually led to what some would call a revolution. When Louis Riel did this, he was a hero and was standing up for his people; some would say that doing this led to his death, but it didn’t. As the revolution moved on, Canadian troops were deployed to force Ruperts Land (or Manitoba) to join Canada, which led to war. The Metis people were heavily outnumbered, and they lost the fight, even though they knew the land. When to war was going on, Louis Riel captured Fort Garry in 1870, British citizens were ferrous and wanted to take it back but flunked. This led to the capture of Thomas Scott; Thomas would yell racial stigmas every night, which led to Louis Riel executing him, some would say this is unlawful, but I think this was justified. For instance, He was known for violent actions against the Metis People, including the decapitation of Metis people’s heads, and would cry out racial slurs at them. He would be exceedingly racist to Metis. And he would neglect Metis people. He would pertain to them as “Not people” and “******’*”. Thus I would call this execution justified as the Committee found him guilty of treason. Now some people would say Louis Riel is the one who mandated the execution to be done, and yes, he did. But this is where most people are mistaken. Louis Riel sanctioned a legal vote with the valid government he established; the Metis people voted on the call. Hence Louis Riel is not the one who executed him; it was finished on a vote and was done lawfully. Yet still, the Canadian government impeached him for manslaughter and put him to death on November 16, 1885. In conclusion to this case, I uncover Louis to be a hero. Not the “monster” some people assume he is. Established on the Historical information presented, I would like to conclude this topic by confessing people should recall Louis Riel for being a hero and should pertain to him as the one who ultimately said “No” to supremacists and non-equal rights. Therefore I conclude Louis Riel as the one who saved the Metis people’s rights. 

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Conclusion:

I would like to conclude this project by saying, this is probably one of the only projects that I really understood from the start. What I mean by this, is that if we go back to the introduction, I explained what our project was about and how we needed to pick a topic to write about. Well looking back at what I said, the reason I pick Louis Riel as my topic is because I have done a lot of reading and studying in the past. I feel all the information I built up from reading the Louis Riel comic strip really transferred into this project. Thats why I felt I understood this project and area of studying so well, making this one of the most beloved projects in grade 9. Finally, I would like to end this blog with my answer to the driving question, How can an understanding of nationalism of the past, help us make sense of today? This question was very interesting and brought up a good point, how does nationalism in the past help us make sense of today, there are many people we would consider nationalists who are idols. This makes me think back to Louis Riel (the person I chose for my topic) he showed the Canadian government that just because you’re white, doesn’t give you any more privilege or authority over other race’s. He showed that even though you may have power and authority over people in your government, does not mean you can “Force” a place out of your jurisdiction to join Canada. Therefore I conclude this by saying the people in the past who where nationalists, can help us better understand how Canada became Canada, and who was really responsible for making different provinces and areas of Canada like Louis Riel. I hope you have a awesome rest of your day, and Ill see you in a Scimatics blog later. 

Introduction:

Hello everyone, welcome back to another blog post. Today I’m going to be talking about my most recent Scimatics project Chemistry Stories. Now Scimatics has been rough lately, as Im more of a math person and this project was a bit more “Science” based. For this project we needed to make an animation on covalent and ionic bonds. This project was “very” difficult, and thats an understatement. Now some people may have found this project interesting, or fun, but this one was quite difficult, for many different reasons. Lets move on to the Milestones.

Milestones:

Milestone 1: For MS1 we obviously started with a mind map, as we usually start our projects with a mind map. Now this mind pad was the exact same as our last project mind map’s. For this mind map we needed to include Personal Questions on the project, Questions we wrote from our whiteboards, and Thoughts on our project so far. Thats it for Milestone 1.

Milestone 2: Now there was not really a Milestone 2 nor a Milestone 3, not sure why but for this reason I’m just going to guess on what I think was Milestone 2. So for Milestone 2 we had to do an Investigation 2-A animation Copy. Now for this Milestone we needed to make a short animation representing lab safety and how important it is. We also needed to show the procedure for the upcoming lab experiment we did. Milestone 2, done.

Milestone 3: Like I said beforehand, there wasn’t really a Milestone 3, so I’m just going to guess. So for Milestone 3 we needed to do a Lab 2A Write-Up, now this connects to what I was just talking about in Milestone 2, where we had to make an animation showing the procedure. For this though, we needed to do a lab write up on our lab experiment we did, showing what we hypothesized before the experiment, and etc…

Milestone 4: For MS4 we needed to make a story board for our animation, now this I could have done better on, mostly because I forgot to include both ionic and covalent bonds in my story board, which was indeed, a requirement. So room for improvement on the story board aspect. In general I think I could have been a bit more focused and enthusiastic while doing my work in general. 

Milestone 5: Now for our last milestone, our animation, for this we needed to make a story, about an ionic bond, and a covalent bond, not much else to say really. So I’m just going to leave an embed so you can check it out for yourself: 

Conclusion:

In conclusion to this project, I can confidently say this was one of the hardest Scimatics

projects ever done. I suck at drawing, I always have, and making an animation is really really hard, therefore I had some late nights doing homework. Overall though I got the project done and finished and I’m proud of the work I’ve accomplished. Now its time for my answer to the driving question: “How do the election arrangements of atoms determine the chemical and physical properties of elements and compounds?” Well, chemical properties of each element are determined by the element’s electronic configuration and particularly by its outermost valence electrons. In addition, the total number of electron shells an atom determines which period it belongs to. Thank you for tuning into our last Scimatics blog for semester 1, and Ill see you in semester 2.