Month: March 2020

Hi guys and welcome back to another blog post! Today I will be reflecting on the most recent project we completed called Let’s Get Riel.  The driving question is “How can we present past actions and decisions through images to help us make decisions of what is fair or unjust?”. The main idea for this project was that we would choose an event, and make a instagram post with three different images, a caption, a question and hashtags. The person that I was paired up with was Gabe.

Milestone 1: Current Event

For this milestone, we chose an article and just had to complete the who, what, where, when, why and how, also write down your thoughts on the article and ask a few questions at the end.

The competencies that we were being assessed on in this milestone were:

Milestone 2: Topic Research

For this next milestone, we have been put into our partners and have chosen a topic to research and indicate the who, what, where, when, why and how of our story. The topic that my partner (Gabe) and I chose was about the spread of smallpox amongst the First Nations that the leaders of the Hudson’s Bay company caused from putting that disease into blankets that they gave to the First Nations as a sign of peace, which later dropped their population by 90%.

Connect: How do I understand my own and others’ personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?

Understand Ethical Dimensions: How do we decide if the actions and decisions of the past were fair or unjust, or should or should not have been taken?

Although there is very limited information on this story, I think that we could’ve tried to go even deeper in the internet and looked at some more books to try and find more details about our topic. That way, it would help us and others better understand our instagram post that we would eventually put on based on the research from this milestone. For the other competency, it is pretty clear that the decision that the leaders of the Hudson’s bay company made was very unfair, which made it pretty easy for us to accomplish this competency.

Milestone 3: Images Draft

Next, in this milestone, we started to actually create image drafts and captions for our instagram post.

First drafts:

Feedback:

Second drafts:

Feedback:

Connect: How do I understand my own and others’ personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?

Understand Ethical Dimensions: How do we decide if the actions and decisions of the past were fair or unjust, or should or should not have been taken?

The role of our caption is to describe what happened in our story and the images are supposed to show wether the decision (in this case, the leaders of the HBC’s decision) was fair or unjust). I think that our connection that we made, for example our first one (the drawer on image), we made it more emotional and made it show how unjust this thing really was, which really helped with both of the competencies.

Milestone 4: Final Image Presentations

For our next milestone, we presented our captions and images to the class, here was our presentation:

Connect: How do I understand my own and others’ personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?

Understand Ethical Dimensions: How do we decide if the actions and decisions of the past were fair or unjust, or should or should not have been taken?

I think that we pretty much nailed this milestone. Aside from the presentation looking really good, our caption was just the perfect amount of words and described the story and extra details very well. The images were also very good, I think that they showed the unfairness of this story with the symbols, graphs and quote and also helped people to understand the personal connection that the HBC has with those blankets even today, it also describes one of the many times that the First Nations were screwed over by the Europeans while they were trying to colonise them.

Milestone 5: Louis Riel Literary Response

In this milestone, since we had been studying Louis Riel for quite a while and even read a book on him, we wrote an in-class essay.

Connect: How do I understand my own and others’ personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?

Understand Ethical Dimensions: How do we decide if the actions and decisions of the past were fair or unjust, or should or should not have been taken?

I think that I did well in both the competencies and had all requirements that I needed to include in it. But, for the actual essay side of it, even reading it now, I can’t really understand it very well because it’s a bit all over the place and has quite a lot of grammar mistakes. So, this was definitely not my best work.

To conclude, this project was really fun to learn more about the First Nations and other stories about them because I am always up to learning something new about them. In this project, this was also our first time to use instagram as a way to post our final products.

See you in my next blog post!

 

Guess what’s back? That’s right, Destination Imagination is back once again! Except this time, its pretty different. If you’d like to see what Destination Imagination is, click here to see my blog post from last year, or click here to see their website. This year’s challenges are: 

My group (Julia, Ben, Ally, Meg and Kaden) and I choose to do the scientific challenge: First Encounter. The basis of our challenge was to choose a species and habitat which would both have a sort of morph amongst the first encounter which we would surround with a story, team choice elements and other required elements of the challenge. The species we chose was to do a black mamba, our original idea and inspiration was one of those dragon costumes that they have at Chinese festivals, but this is how the costume turned out:

The deliverable that I was in-charge of was the outsider species and habitat. So, basically researching more about our species and doing the set for the habitat. The problems about our set was that the trees were too high and the florida sign was too big, so we’ll have to fix that for provincials. The species on the other hand, I had done this document filled with facts about the black mamba, but I think I could’ve done a lot more. 

The morph was supposed to be one of us pulling over a sheet to reveal the black mamba doing something called ecdysis to reveal a completely different colour. The problem was that the sheet that was covering our morph had basically already fallen off before the presentation even started. 

Next was our habitat morph, we decided to have it as Florida. As you may or may not know, florida is presently suffering from a few rat problems here and there, and what better to come restore it’s ecosystem? Our black mamba species, Bubbles! Our habitat morph, which also did not turn out that well, was a total mess. Our plan was to make our own scissor lift and wind it up to have a palm tree come out of “the ground” which was really a staging block that we had created to put in the middle of our theatre in the round stage. The problem was that our staging block wasn’t tall enough to fit our tree so, what we did was cover the rest of the tree with a sheet. There was another problem, we were unsuccessful on making the scissor lift, but thankfully, we actually found one that was the perfect size just in Mr Gross’ classroom! During the presentation though, the scissor lift took forever to wind up and the pulling of the sheet didn’t make it look too good either. 

Another thing that didn’t go quite as planned was our team choice elements. Our first was a sound board that we wanted to have to enhance our presentation using sound effects because we didn’t plan enough or pursue the idea. Our other team choice element was having recycled costumes and I mean, they were recycled but if we were to really actually put that as a team choice element, we should’ve used things like plastic bottles or cans for the costumes.

To conclude, we’ve got quite a lot of things that we’ve got to work on before we are going to present it on FaceTime, because of the corona virus. Here’s a list:

– Make our costumes look more recycled

– Make morphs better (original, clearer and have them look better)

– Use more technical methods for species morph

– Practice set up and going through everything

– Include way more research in our story

 

Hi y’all welcome back to my blog. Today I will be reflecting on a project that we just recently just completed called Metaphor Machines. Have you ever seen any of those super cool “trick shot” videos? Well, this is basically what it is, except our machine would have to have a metaphor to the scientific method. In this project, I was in a group with Felix and Noah. 

The first competency that we were being assessed on was questioning and predicting. Which means demonstrate a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest. In this project, it just basically means that we would always use class time efficiently without any distractions. To be honest, there were a few times where I would go off and talk to some of my classmates around me for a little while. But overall, my group and I would get what we needed to get done and I was pretty happy with how our metaphor machine worked. 

Our second competency that we were being assessed on in this project was reasoning and analyzing, meaning estimating reasonably. In this project, this was about our final blueprint for our metaphor machine and if it was complete and accurate. I think that we definitely met this competency because it had a grid scale, all measurement were labeled very accurately and all the lines were easy to be distinguished. Here is our blueprint: 

Our next competency that we were being assessed on in this project was planning and conducting. In this project, it meant that we had a hand built series and parallel circuits which were used with efficiency in our metaphor machine. In our blueprints, also having accurate circuit diagrams, diagrams with proper symbols, neat and easy to understand diagrams and having our measurements of current, voltage and resistance. You can certainly cross all of those things on your list because they are all done. Although, we did have a little problem with our measurements, they were all fixed and included on our blueprint. 

Our final competency that we were being assessed on in this project was scientific communication: formulate physical or mental models to describe a phenomenon. In this project, it meant that we would have a video recorded of our complete operation of the machine and voice overs added in there which explain the sequence of the scientific method as the machine progresses. We had completed this video, filmed by me, edited and voice overs by Noah. Here it is:

Overall, I really enjoyed this project. Although my group and I sort of had a struggle at the beginning, we were working pretty well together at the end. We all had our own skills to contribute into the project and use them to make an amazing final product; our machine! If I were to do this project again though, I would make our lights from our circuits turn on at different times instead of at the same time and also, personally, I would try to make the machine look “prettier”  just as a detail.