by Alex -

Confederation At It’s Finest

Hi y’all and welcome back to another blog post! In this blog post, I will be telling you about another project that we have just completed in this year’s Humanities class. The driving question for this project was “How and why did canada develop into a nation?”. After getting split up into our colonies, for the past few weeks, we learned about what it was like back then (before confederation) and about our colonies. In this project, we basically imitated how confederation in Canada went, except with our own little twist: the Charlottetown conference and the Quebec conference. Except for us, we had our preliminary proposals presented on a keynote and our final proposals presented by a video commercial. 

1. Confederation Response

Our first milestone was to read a document and basically take notes to put into an essay that would be answering the question: What factors lead to confederation? 

My main point that talked about in my entire text was about human nature (i.e it is human nature to seek independence and prosperity). I continued to ramble on proving good points provided with good evidence and research that I think really boosted up my showing of the core competency “Evidence”.  Our other core competency was “create”. Now, in this milestone, there wasn’t really anything for us to “create” as in images and such that would enhance our text, but, as I continue to improve my writing skills, I think that I used a good technique in organizing my different points to include as much information as possible with it still all making sense in the process. 

Core competencies: 

Evidence: How do we evaluate evidence to decide if it is adequate to support a historical conclusion?

Create: What literacy skills am I using to write, speak, and represent in the texts I create?

2. Colony Research

Next, after we were split up into our colony research groups; mine was canada west with Holly, Ryan, Anthony and Finn. We started to form our preliminary proposals with doing research on our and the other colonies. In this document, we chose a source and stated reasons for us to be for or against confederation. 

Evidence: How do we evaluate evidence to decide if it is adequate to support a historical conclusion?

Create: What literacy skills am I using to write, speak, and represent in the texts I create?

In this milestone, there wasn’t really much for us to do about “evidence”, since all we really had to do was find a source, write down the reasons for and against confederation in point form, then, write down your source—plus, to have a separate work cited document. Next, for our “create” competency, we did all what was asked to do, but the feedback that we received was that we just scraped the surface of some of the complexities of canada east, so that in the future, we need to divide our research more evenly to show the efforts of 5 individuals. I understand what Ms Maxwell, was talking about because, although we did split up the tasks as in each person giving a source, we should’ve gone way more in depth. 

3. Preliminary proposals

Next was our preliminary proposals. In this milestone, it’s where we created a keynote to outline 6 factors for our colony to join confederation. Our factors were:

– To have our capital city in Ottawa

– To have the railway connect all the colonies

– To get more land for our farming (with canada east)

– For the primary language to be English and secondary to be french

– To build canals to connect all of our great lakes

– Expand western of canada (British Colombia)

Here was our keynote:

Evidence: How do we evaluate evidence to decide if it is adequate to support a historical conclusion?

Create: What literacy skills am I using to write, speak, and represent in the texts I create?
In our presentation, I don’t think that we showed “evidence” well because we weren’t being specific enough for things such as where we wanted the railway to go and where we wanted the canals to be, so we kept that in mind for our final proposals.
On the other hand, we did show our “create” competency pretty well because we used visuals, we spoke clearly and we all spoke in the presentation.

4. Video screenplay

Our next step was to make a screenplay for what we wanted our commercial to look like. Although, I did have a little trouble communicating with my group with this milestone, we still got it done and had some pretty good ideas. I also made sure to make some visuals to specify parts of our presentation.

Evidence: How do we evaluate evidence to decide if it is adequate to support a historical conclusion?

Create: What literacy skills am I using to write, speak, and represent in the texts I create?

For the curricular competency “evidence”, there wasn’t much of a way for us to show that competency. But, for “create”, we did show that pretty well because, we made our screenplay simple, yet creative, clear and detailed, making it easier for us to follow it on the day that we filmed.

5. Colony commercial

Our next milestone was our colony commercial, where we presented our improved factors in a 1-2 minute video. In our new presentation, we didn’t do much to our factors other than make them more specific.
https://youtu.be/xZK4PLaIwxU

Evidence: How do we evaluate evidence to decide if it is adequate to support a historical conclusion?

Create: What literacy skills am I using to write, speak, and represent in the texts I create?

There wasn’t really much of an opportunity for us to show “evidence”. But, on the create side, we made our commercial light hearted, clear, not over the time limit and specific (thanks to the visuals in the back, using the green screen).

6. Final bill proposals and decision

Our next step was to create the “contract” binding all of our factors together, for each colony to make a decision of wether or not they wanted to join. The only problem? None of the colonies wanted to join confederation (in our case). Here were the final proposals and why we decided not to join:

Proposals:

Railway – Ottawa and toronto to halifax and extending to British columbia

Military protection – provided by capital city

Financial aid – be supported in case of disaster or invasion – canals, industry, railway

Responsible government – represented in the House of Commons in the capital city, represented by the same number of seats, elections held and run by canada east

Language rights – English as first and French as second, spoken in all governmental buildings and taught in school

Ottawa as capital city

Reasons for not joining confederation:

– Having to be in charge of military, probably giving up most of our population since we are the biggest

– Losing money, not gaining any

– No guaranteed land gain for farming

– No free trade

– Expanding west

– Equal representatives

– No financial support from other colonies

 

Anyways, all of this aside, this was a great project that I really enjoyed doing. We got to learn more about Canada’s history which is always super interesting, we got to use a green screen and we got to imitate and reenact what it what like back in 1866.

See you in my next blog post!

by Alex -

Cake Terms?! | A Scimatics Project

Hallo and welcome to another blog post. Today, I am proud to announce that I have come up with a pretty good introduction to do, every single blog post, I will be greeting you in a different language, this time, it’s German, and the other, well 50 ish times were in English. Now, in this blog post I am going to be discussing a new project that we had just completed in Scimatics called “Like Terms”. In this project, we learned about polynomials, collecting like terms, etc. 

For our final presentation, we got to choose anything that we wanted to do that involved us collecting like terms: a cookie (with the ingredients), music (with different notes and instruments), a bridge (with the materials), etc. Also, in this project, we got to choose our own driving question based on what we decided to do for our final presentation. My group’s driving question (Kaia, Julia and I) was “How can polynomials represent the quantity of each ingredient in a cake?”. Because, what we decided to do was make a cake that looked like an iPad (just to make it more PLP themed).

Understanding and Solving – Apply multiple strategies to solve problems in both abstract and contextualized situations. 

In this case, it’s combining the like terms (in our cake/project) and demonstrating it. In our final presentation, we did show our original polynomials and it after collecting the like terms but, because we had so many different ingredients in our solution (which is how we used like terms, the amount of cups used with each ingredient), even after collecting the like terms, it was still pretty long.  

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

In this case, it was based on the quality of our presentation: practiced, clear, detailed, etc. And of us using the correct usage of vocabulary: term, coefficient, exponent, degree. We did prepare a pretty good quality presentation and did use the correct vocabulary, but I think that we could’ve used more of that vocabulary in our presentation, not to mention maybe trying to use coefficients or exponents to simplify our final like terms. 

Connecting and Reflecting: Connect mathematical concepts to each other and to other areas and personal interests. 

In terms of our project, this just means having personalized and original work done in our project. Other than having a little inspiration for the cake and using recipes to make the different parts of the cake, everything was original and personalized to us; the iPad apps/apple pencil were our little touches to make them more “PLP”. For our presentation, I think that we could’ve made the keynote a little more artistic and eye appealing, personalized to us, but that is all I’d really change based on it being original and personalized. 

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

For this project, this competency just really means that we have used all of our class time very efficiently for our project work and extra learning. Every single class, we made sure that we got all of the work we had to get done, fast and productively. On the other hand, because we couldn’t make the cake in class, we worked on our polynomials/like terms, keynote, practicing the keynote and finding good and as simple as possible recipes. 

Click here to see my presentation:

Scimatics Presentation | Like Terms

To conclude, I had lots of fun with this project because I got to work with some classmates/friends that had good skills that helped with this project (i.e. Julia has lots of experience with cooking/baking and Kaia is very artistically minded and creative). Not to mention, I also learned how to use/make fondant because I am very inexperienced in cooking and baking. I also loved the concept of the project: having more freedom and options of what to do yet still using maths techniques to simplify the making of it (because math is important for lots of aspects in life). 

See you in my next blog post!