Revolutions on Trial

Hello, and welcome back to my blog. This post is about the latest project for PLP Humanities, Revolutions on Trial. In this project I learned about the French Revolution, the causes of a revolution, and what determines a successful revolution. So, without further ado, here is the post.

As with all PLP projects, we started with a driving question that we strived to answer in the project. The Driving Question for this project was: How Might we as Legal Teams Determine the Effectiveness and Ineffectiveness of a Revolution? And this is how I found the answer.

The first big activity we did in this project was called Nation X. We created a simulation of a society with very large class divisions. There were 4 groups, each with different right and abilities.this activity lasted two days, and contained many events that reflect actual similar societies. For example, in our simulation there was a large revolution to put our old king back in place, and this revolution split the country in two groups. My full reflection on this experience from my perspective is below.

The New Republic Of Nation X, in my opinion, was a fair and functional society. We had food, farms, wealth, happiness, and entertainment. I think that we achieved this by rooting out the people who would not fit in this society and creating a society so good it doesn’t even need laws. To ensure a fair and functional society, I think that there are three main elements that need to be there: basic needs met (food, water, etc…), some way of preventing people from doing bad things (laws, rules, or just generally good people), and lastly, an economy that produces these two things repeatedly. I think of these three things, the last one is the most important because to ensure the survival of a society, the society needs to be relatively self sufficient. But, both of the nations together are not functional in the end, so I do not think our classroom as a whole accomplished the goal. But, overall, this was a really fun activity, and I think it was also an interesting social experiment.

Another great tool to understand how and why revolutions happen is the crane brinton scale. Crane Brinton was a historian of France, and among other things, he studied multiple revolutions and fund common traits in all of them. Using his observations, he create a diagram that split a revolution into four stages: the incubation stage, the moderate stage, the crisis stage, and the recovery stage. My diagram of his theory is here.

Now that we had a clearer understanding of why revolutions happen, we were ready to start reading a famous story based off of an actual revolution. This story was Animal Farm. Animal Farm is a widely renowned novel with a movie adaptation written by George Orwell, which follows the events of a farm as the animal rise up against their captors and form their own society. We had book group discussions about what we read daily. It was great to see what a revolution is like from the perspectives of the people in it.

While reading the book, we were also assigned to groups of six that would each be studying a revolution. I was assigned the French Revolution. I researched the French Revolution until I fully understood it, and then created a graphic organizer to show my learning, Which I revised once.

The next major step in this project was the Animal Farm written response. This was a three-paragraph writing were we explained the anatomy of the revolution in Animal Farm using Crane Brinton’s theory. We had an hour to write this in class, and I think that I got it done fairly Easily in that time constraint.

My thoughts on the revolution in Animal Farm, using the Crane Brinton theory

Now, we knew what we needed to know and were prepared the start creating the final product of this project. The final product is a courtroom trial were we put the effectiveness of the revolution up to the test. We created affadivats, scripts, props, and a set to perform out trials in front of our parents, friends, colleges, and even some random people. And after all that preparation, this is the final result:

So that conclude today’s post, about the revolutions on trial project. I hope you enjoyed this post, and if you want to check out my group member’s blogs, click any of the links below. Thanks for reading, bye.

Cole D.

Dana P.

Makenna C.

Cooper K.

Carter C.

Epidemic Exponents!

Hello, and welcome. I am back to school, and starting this year in scimatics with exponents! In the first scimatics project this year, Game of Exponent Laws, I learned how to evaluate exponents, exponent laws, and more. So without further ado, here is the post.

To kick of the project, we did a quick activity were we made up games that used one and two dice. We got into groups of four, and started working. And here are the rules we came up with:

Rollie poll-E

Assemble all the players in a circle. Decide who will roll first, and have them roll the die. If their roll is a 4, 5, or 6, add the roll to their point tally. If their roll is a 1, or 3, subtract their roll from their point tally. Point tallies cannot drop below zero, and if they reach twenty, that person wins. If they roll a 2, they get to roll again and multiply that roll by two and add it to their point tally.

Rollie poll-E 2.0

To win, gain 5 points. You gain a point when you correctly answer a question faster than your opponent(s). Choose someone to roll each round, and have them roll the two dice. Once the dice have settled, every player starts solving the math problem. If the dice are both even, devide the greater roll by the smaller one. If the dice are both odd, multiply them. If the dice are odd and even, add them together. Once you figure out the answer, say it aloud, and if you are the first to solve the problem, you get a point. Decimal points are allowed for answers. If the roll has a 1 then subtract 1 from the other roll

(Special thanks to Jocelyn for thinking of the names)

So, as common with scimatics projects, we all were supposed to make a mind map that’s outlines what we already know and what questions we have.

Project Start Mindmap

Now, in this project, the milestones were not a linear process, but in a slightly erratic way, with the milestones not coming in numerical order. So, for the sake of this post, I will tell you about the events of this project in chronological order.

After these first assignments, me and my partner started brainstorming Ideas for our game. Our first milestone was milestone four (confusing). For this project, everybody was given a partner, and together you and your partner would make a game that uses exponents as a central mechanic. So, eventually, me and Aliciah decided to make a game about viruses. Our idea was quite similar to pandemic: contagion, which is a game were each player is a virus trying to exterminate humanity. Our first draft of our rules are here.

Throughout the next week, we updated our game rules and did some exponent practice, and eventually landed on this set of rules:

After making these final game rules, it was time to make our game board and pieces.

Final Game Board!

And, of course, there were curricular competencies for this project, which are listed below.

Applying and innovating: Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through personal or collaborative approaches.

All class time is used efficiently for learning without distractions. All group members contribute equally.

I used my class time well, and I think that is reflected in the quality of my work. My partner and I shared equal part in the workload for this project.

Reasoning and Analyzing: Use logic and patterns to solve puzzles and play games

A clear and simple points system and win conditions for the game are carefully designed.

Points system is clearly represented by physical game pieces, and finding out who wins a game is easy and concise.

Communicating and Representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms

A set of clear, complete, interesting and personalized instructions are created for how each player takes their turn. Examples are included. The game design uses at least 4 different exponent laws and using these laws is integrated into each player’s turn.

Our game features game rules completely written from scratch, with our own ideas and examples of gameplay and game pieces. There are over four exponent laws included in our rules.

And that concludes my blog post for today! Thanks for reading this far, and if you want to check out my partner Alicah’s blog, click here.

See you in the next post, bye.

Don’t Eat Rat Feces!

Today, I am writing a summative post about my latest, and last project of the year. This project is called Comic Cells. I learned a ton from this project, from what subsequent endocytosis is to why you shouldn’t eat rat poo. So, without further ado, here is the post.

As with all scimatics projects, we started off the project with a mind map of existing knowledge, question, sources, and anything else about the topic. Here is mine:

Project Start Mind Map

For the second milestone of the project, I created a wanted poster for a disease containing the date of discovery, how it affects cells, it’s mortality rate, and more.

Typhoid Wanted Poster

Then I started working on a storyboard to guide the making of my comic. The storyboard was a very rough guide to the comic, and some parts were not even in the final comic.

Rough Storyboard

Then I started to research a TON of facts about the virus I chose. (Hantavirus) To read more about hantavirus, veiw the sources down below. I learned a ton about cellular processes, and then started drawing pictures for my comic. I am not the best at drawing, so this was a hard task for me. However, I a very proud of the final comic, which is the namesake for this post.

And, as with all projects, there were core competencies I worked towards throughout the project. They are:

1. Questioning and predicting: Demonstrate a sustained curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest.

All class time is used for learning and creating a comic book story about cellular processes and/or diseases. I think I used almost all of my class time efficiently, but even so I still think I could’ve worked slightly faster in class and had less homework after school. But it worked out in the end, which is good.

2. Scientific communication: communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies

Correct vocabulary and accurate diagrams are used. At least 10 interesting science vocabulary words are included in the story. I used more than ten science words in my Story, and I think my diagrams are concise and accurate at what they represent.

Evaluating: Demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of evidence

Cell/bacteria/virus characters interact in a scientific way. Symptoms and logical outcomes of the chosen disease/cellular/ body process are integrated into the story. In my story, the reaction to the virus is realistic to real-life cases, and the outcomes are on the probable side.

Sources:

Source 1

Source 2

Source 3

Source 4

Source 5

Source 6

Source 7

Thanks for making it this far. If you liked this post, make sure to check my other ones here. See you in the next post! Bye.

Atoms

As you can probably tell from the title, this project was one about atoms (and molecules, Kenetic energy, etc…). We spent about three weeks learning, coding and thinking to answer the driving question for this project: how can the behaviour of matter be explained by the Kinetic Molecular theory and the Atomic theory? So, without further ado, here is the post.

We started this project with a mind map and an experiment/magic trick. We wrote the mind map about what we already knew about matter, and then all of our questions about it.

Project start mind map

For the demonstration of atomic and molecular theory, the teacher performed a trick using a sealed bottle filled with water and an eyedropper.

The trick works by utilizing pressure. When the bottle is not squeezed, it looks like this:

Eyedropper at the top

But when the bottle is squeezed, the pressure increases, forcing the eyedropper down, and if you are subtle, it looks as if you magically made the eyedropper go down.

Squeezed bottle with the eyedropper down

One really cool activity was called the gemstone identification challenge. The whole class partnered up to measure the volume, weight, and then calculate the density of a few stones. The class average density was 3.74 grams per millemeter, and the closest density to that was that of colourless topaz, so we confirmed that the stones were colourless topaz.

Gemstone ID sheet

For milestone 2, we created accurate models for our coded project. In order to make our simulations or games follow this competency: Several different atoms/molecules, different states of matter, and particle motion are represented in the finished product. A historical model of the atom is chosen and implemented, we created some sort of model and text.

In order to create realistic and functioning models of atoms, molecules, and in my case quarks, I worked on three slides of information and graphics. It took three other versions to create to the one shown below.

The next week was mostly spent learning more about matter and coding or refining our scratch projects. Then we did milestone four, which was a coding plan for the rest of the project. This was my milestone four coding plan:

Features:
Press space to show Bohr models
Press M to mute music
Press N to unmute music
Press Q to create more clones
Press 1-3 to change molecule type
Gravity that can be turned on and off
Click the reset button to reset the simulation
Use the temperature slider to change how fast the particles move.
Setting the temperature to zero will stop the particles from moving, other than gravity acting on them.
You can create different states of matter by adjusting the temperature and gravity.
you can adjust how much gravity there is.
You can move between subatomic particle models, Bohr models, and no models by pressing space bar twice This kinetic molecular theory is included in the simulation when the particles move. They follow the Kinetic molecular theory.

After creating a plan, I continued coding my scratch project until it was completely done and polished. If you want to check out my simulator, click here. After all was said and done, I created a summative mind map of the project, which helped round of the end of the project.

As with all projects, there were curricular competencies which you can see below:

Questioning and Predicting: Demonstrate a sustained curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest.

All class time is used efficiently for learning without distractions. I used all my class time efficiently, and I am very proud of my final product.

Scientific Communication: communicate ideas, findings, and solutions to problems using scientific language, representations, and digital technologies.

Several different atoms/ molecules, different states of matter, and particle motion are represented in the finished product. A historical model of the atom is chosen and implemented. I have three different molecule designs: H2O (water), carbon dioxide (CO2), and ozone (O3). I also have three Bohr models of the elements: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, And finally two subatomic models of protons and neutrons.

Reasoning and Analyzing: Use logic and patterns (including coding) to solve puzzles and play games.

An interactive Scratch coded matter simulator or game is created with logical conditions and functional user controls. I created a simulator with four variables that the player/user can change, and extra aesthetic changes as well. The user can change limits all the variables, and the layout is logical and easy to use.

Thanks for reading my post! I had a great time doing this project, and i am sure to do more, so stay tuned .Even though I have featured it already, just in case, here is the link to my scratch matter simulator. Thanks to my friend Noah for all the coding help and feedback. If you want to check out his blog, click here. See you in the next post!

Exploring European Exploration

Welcome to another summative post. Today, I am going to talk about our latest project on European Exploration. This was a three weeks long, and consists of five milestones. So, without further ado, here is the post.

The driving question for this project was: What Did European Settlement Mean For Everyone Involved? To answer this question, there are two thing you need to know first: what is European settlement, and who was involved, and this post is documenting how I found the answer to this.

We kicked off this project with our first milestone: a stream-of-consciousness writing about European Settlement. This was the first assignment of this project.

We did some other activities to build our knowledge, and then did milestone two, a sheet were we used evidence to rank events by significance on a chart. This is what it looked like:

Continuity and Change sheet

Throughout this project, me and my partner have been writing almost everything in one shared document. We have written scripts, notes, photos, content, and sources.

After we finished researching and creating our facts and graphics, we handed the rough infographic in as milestone three.

Milestone 3

Over time, me and Cale refined our infographic, and created six different version before the final product was created.

We then created a script, description, title, QR code, and Keynote magic move for our YouTube video.

Video Script
YouTube Information
QR Code To Video

Using all of this, we created the video which the QR code on the infographic leads to. You can find this video here.

And finally, we worked on putting all 26 infographics up around the school. We decided on were to put the infographics and which ones should go together, then put them up!

And that brings us to now, where I can answer the driving question: What Did European Settlement Mean For Everyone Involved? Well, the answer is complicated, because of how broad of an event it was. In my infographic, I focus on one aspect of it: alliance and trade. European settlement affected the First Nations, British, and French. Even today, and I’m sure for long afterward, trading will remain a constant. But what resources that are being traded, how they are traded, and the people trading them will always be changing. Alliances are crucial to humanity, and we are able to accomplish much more when we ally together. European Settlement gave new resources, trading routes, and opportunities for alliance to everyone involved, and that completely changed history for long after.

Thanks for reading my post! If you want to check out my partner’s experience with “The More Things Change” project, click here. Anyways, thanks for reading my blog and see you in the next post.

Destination Imagination!

In this term as a challenge, we did something that PLP has done for more than five years! It is a challenge that is completely done by students, and consists of an instant challenge and a team challenge. I cannot tell you guys about the instant challenge because it could give other teams an advantage. But, since I can still talk about the team challenge, talk about it I will do.

If you don’t already know what DI is, they are an organization that hosts global project-based learning competitions for students to compete in. If you want more information, click here. As PLP students, we compete in these challenges, and for me and my group, we got the technical challenge: The Next Level. In short, there are four different categories; technical, scientific, fine arts, and engineering. The technical challenge was about making a specific storyline in a video-game style.

To start it out, we made sheets of each team members strengths and weaknesses, and decided on general roles for the project.

We also completed interference contracts, which are forms that state that we will not cheat, tell others about the contract, or use other people’s ideas. We completed other worksheets to decide on the storyline and specify things that must be completed.

Team choice element inventory #1

All throughout this project, our team hub for communication was constantly being updated with what has to be done, what has been done, and certain events to prepare for. Once our group decided on what storyline to use, we wrote the first version of our script. This script would be revised later to check certain boxes, but the general idea was always the same.

Then, it was time for the instant challenge to be released. I cannot talk about the instant challenge, so I will skip over it. But, I can say that it was quite a hustle to get done, but we did do it in the end.

We also had to complete tournament data forms, which include an expense report and questionnaire, as well as safety forms.

We also completed meeting notes every time our group met, resulting in thirteen individual notes.

Meeting notes

After we finished writing our final script we moved on to filming. The script had three other revisions before we used the final one. In collaboration with Noah, we made the tool (I made the lower body, he made the upper body) and worked together to refine it. Here is a small worksheet reflecting on my D.I. Experience:

I used to think/Now I think

We finally started filming on the last week before we put in our team challenge video. Our editor had a very small amount of time to edit this, so shout out to him! We also filmed and scripted a Q&A video to go along with our main one. We finished the final challenge video, and you can check it here.

Go check my group member’s blogs as well:

Sabrina’s blog

Noah’s blog

Patrick’s blog

Xander’s blog

Ariane’s blog

Also, here is the full tournament award stream. Anyways, thanks for reading my post. See you next time!

Argh, Matey!

For our second project this quarter, we did a project about the Age Of Exploration, and this is a summative post About my learning throughout this project.

To kick off this project, we watched a pirate movie based off of a real hijacking. We talked about pirates a bit, and then learned what cause and consequence are. Cause and consequence is how all events happen; they have a cause, and then more events because of it. We made webs of cause and consequence to practice this skill:

Chess web of cause and consequence

The whole project was about teaching us about the causes and consequences of European exploration. The driving question was: “What Was The Impact Of Global Exploration?”. To answer this question we first, you guessed it, learn what global exploration is.

Every day, we got a lecture on exploration, from the invention of new inventions like the caraval or astrolabe, to people who completely changed history like Christopher Columbus, or prince Henry the navigator. We did different reflection activities to help absorb the knowledge, like these below:

Sketch and Tell

Then, we did milestone 2, which was a large web of cause and consequence about the European exploration.

Large Web

We finally used our device skills to create a augmented reality presentation. This presentation was of a story written by me about the age of exploration.

And the answer to the driving question: the impact of global exploration is in the language we speak, the food we eat, and the things we do. The merging of cultures from global exploration caused many, many new things, and predicting the world without global exploration is nearly impossible, considering how much it changed the world.

Now, this project was a great journey, and I learned tons about our history. I also had tons of fun writing this post as well. You might want to check out some of my classmates views on this project too!

Sepaus

Colton

Thanks for reading my post! See you in my next one.

Student blogging challenge: the ACTUAL last day

Today, I am writing about the blogging challenge I have been doing for this whole quarter. So without further ado, here is the post!

When we started this project I will admit it: I really did not like the sound of making one blog post every day until the end of the quarter. But, as time went on, writing the blog posts quickly grew on me, and by the end, I really enjoyed writing the posts.

The first post in the challenge was an: “embedding content” post, and I wrote it about snowboard bindings. This post was pretty cool, but it was not my favourite post I have done. Honestly, my favourite post of all time is my blogging challenge day ten post, i am just really proud of all my photoshops, and had a ton of fun writing it.

I learned tons about embedding content, writing, and creating digital content in general. If you look at my first post in the challenge to the lat post, my growth is obvious. I will keep updating my blog and some previous posts, so stay tuned!

This has been an amazing challenge, and I appreciate you for reading along with me. See you in the next post!

Worldview Summative Post

Hello, and welcome to the summative post for the how it started/ how it is going project. The driving question for this project was: what can we learn from the past, and why does it matter to us today? To answer this question, we journeyed back through some of the most influential times history, travelled (virtually) to great museums, and finally, made a virtual museum all about worldview and historical events.

The project started with a mind map about museums and their specific features

Then we did milestone 1, which was a small museum exhibit representing your growth since the start of the year. I learned how to use many cool photo editing techniques like perspective shifting, light wraps, and more to do this. Our job in this milestone was to transform the idea of how it started/how it is going into a museum exhibit and provide evidence on my opinion. I believe I did this quite well, but if I did it again I would probably add a before/after comparison of my work as evidence. Click here for the PDF.

The second milestone was a collage of the important events in your life that shaped your worldview. To do this, we created a timeline of the important events in our lives, found or made pictures to represent those events, and created a collage of the images. This collage would later be revised and changed, and eventually become our “about me” at the start of the museum.

Then, we started milestone three: the history test. This was just one extremely hard question that made me (and some others) realize how little we knew (yet). This milestone made me realize the historical significance of the events I talked about, and decide which ones were the most significant.

We also did many, many other things to prepare for the museum launch, like an artist statement, script for the guided tour, the whole virtual museum, the final meme, a recorded artist statement, and a script for the zoom presentation. After all of that, we finally were ready to present the virtual museum to the world. In this virtual museum, we created modern artworks to represent our modern views of the themes in the older artwork, to show how much we have changed since then.

And with that, the driving question is answered: we can learn a lot front the past, and it matters today so we can learn and improve humanity by looking to the past.

Thank you for reading all the way down here! Of you want to see some of my group members veiw on the project (see what I did there?), click on one of the links below

Carter Aaron Noah

Music!

Hello! This post is day 6 of the 2020 Student Blogging Challenge, and today we are doing a post on music! I love to listen to music, and I can play guitar decently. And without further ado, here is the post.

Record Guitars

all hail the biggest of them all! In January, 2001, the largest playable acoustic guitar was created: measuring 16.75m long, 7.57m wide and 2.67m deep, and weighs four tons. The instrument was built in Porto, Portugal. This record still stands today. source here.

Running down the scale of size works too, clearly, or else why make a guitar smaller than as human hair? Yes, you heard me right, this tiny guitar measures ten micrometres long – 1/20 the thickness of human hair! It can only be played by using lasers to move the strings, and makes sounds at frequencies human can’t even hear.

source.

Minuscule or massive, we must pay respect to our elders. And the oldest and first guitar ever, owned by an artist known as Har-Mose, in ancient Egypt is no exeption. The guitar had three strings and was made of two pieces of wood, with no ability to tune it.

Survey

On that topic, I also made a survey about music Here.

Guess that instrument

Now, here is a guess that instrument quiz.

You have finished the post! Congrats! But, if you look at the start of each paragraph, they are in perfect harmony.