Category: PLP Reflections

World War I

The last 6 months or so have been insane with everything going on; sports seasons were cancelled and of course, school was changed to online rather than attending at our school everyday. But, this still did not stop the teachers from organizing fun and engaging projects for us to work on. One of them being the one I will be discussing today.  

This project’s goal was for us to learn about World War I in the perspective of individual Canadians and to show how it impacted us as a country. As you may or not know, Canada served as a strong ali to Britain during the great war which helped them gain a sense of independence from its colonial past.

In our final product from this project, we were to all individually research a Canadian soldier from WWI as well as a certain topic from the war while incorporating our own research and findings to the answer to our Driving Question: How was Canada’s Identity impacted by the events of WWI? As well as us reading a book and participating in weekly novel studies to help show a deeper understanding to WWI and the characters and text in the book.

Comprehend: What literacy skills am I using to read, listen, and view texts for understanding?

In this project, we participated in weekly novel studies. With the book, I would sometimes go back to what I had just read to reach a better understanding of the perspective of the protagonist and what world war I really was like back then. Another skill that I had used while reading the book for our novel study was being able to summarize what had happened in all those chapters when it came to this book. This came useful to me during our book chats because it made it much easier for me to discuss with my group.

       My assignment from our first Novel Study

In this project, I used a lot of note taking since I had so much information to put in just 3 pages, especially when it came to my topic (The Battle of Somme) since there were many websites, videos and e-books about it. To do so, I highlighted the most important parts of the battle, the people included in it and the overall consequences after this battle.  

Take Historical Perspective: How can we overcome our current concerns, beliefs, and values to understand those of people in the past?                 

Reading this book also helped me reach a better understanding of how miserable everyone was during the war and the emotions and trauma they had experienced. And, in especially the protagonists point of view, which is what many others had to experience as well was having to lose so many loved ones in such a pretty small amount of time. 

Growing on this topic, learning about how important The Battle of Somme was: known as one of the biggest and bloodiest battles in all of human history. It was huge being able to realize how horrible World War I really was. 

To conclude on my book pages, being able to try out a little bit of a different writing style was interesting for me and it actually turned out pretty good. I also enjoyed the formatting I ended up with on my book pages, not taking up too much space but not having too much free space either. The only thing that I would certainly change though is that I would’ve added more information on the Canadians perspective and role in The Battle of Somme. This project was great to learn about world war I since I had always been interested in learning more about it. I also feel like we got to learn so well about it because we explored a fictional point of view, being our novel study and being able to research a soldier that had actually participated in the war not to mention researching our own topic in the war. 

Here’s our book!

 

Time for tPOLs!

Hello and welcome back to another blog post! This year is coming to an end which means…drum roll please….time for tPOLs! tPOLs (Transitional Presentation of Learning) is a student led conference where the student presents to their parents and teachers what they learned, what they improved on and what they’d like to continue to improve on. Different from mPOLs, in your tPOLs, you discuss how you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level. You can visit my tPOLs from last year here and my mPOLs from earlier this year here. So let’s get started shall we?

Maker

At my mPOLs, one of the goals that I wanted to focus the most on in maker was continuing to improve on my movie making and editing skills. So, I decided to choose my Witness to History project to talk about. This project wasn’t just a great project to do but I found that it served as a great example of the fact that I’m continuing to improve my movie making skills because I think that this was the best video I’ve made this year. I had a little animation going on, some great angles and shots, I had some old clips of life before COVID-19, my music sounded pretty good compared to the little experience I have with GarageBand and everything that I had to say was really well put together and not too long.

Since I’ll have so much time on my hands this summer, I want to get even better at movie making; I still have lots and lots of clips from my trip to Costa Rica during winter break earlier this year that I have yet to edit and put together. Maybe even making my own music to go in those videos so I can become more experienced with GarageBand to prepare for next year. 

Humanities

At my mPOLs, I discussed how I’d like to continue on improving my writing skills, since that was something I struggled with since the beginning of grade 8. And although I have come a pretty long way and improved a whole lot, there is still plenty of work to do in terms of my writing. But, if you look at my first blog post compared to my most recent, you can see that I had gotten way better at reflecting on what I had done in my projects and had also improved on my introductions and my conclusions. One of the projects that I decided to talk about was The Great War. I was pretty proud of the writing I had done in the book pages I did because it was just the perfect length, it was really well put together and well detailed. I was also happy that I had started to use better vocabulary in some parts of the book that increased the quality of the writing in the book. Since I struggle a lot with using better vocabulary because about half of what I say or write consists of words like: like, a lot, lots, definetly, etc. This summer, since I’ll have lots of time on my hands, I will be doing lots of reading and practicing essays to continue improving my writing. 

Scimatics

At my tPOLs last year, I had the goal of eventually starting to write notes from lessons down in some sort of notebook. Because for me, it helps me process information way easier. Which I actually have started to do for the past month or two ever since we’ve been doing online school. I have been making lots of notes from the khan academy lessons and quizzes that we’ve done for our time is money and meiosis models project.

In my mPOLs earlier this year I talked about my problem with perfectionism and the fact that I would always go back to my work and tweak and tweak it. Honestly, if there weren’t any deadlines, I would be tweaking my work non stop till the end of time. I got a whole lot better at that this year especially in the last month or so with all my work for that matter. I figured out that the best way to avoid tweaking my work for hours on end was distracting myself. Wether it was going for a run or a walk outside, cleaning my room, or spending time with my family. Which also got me off of my devices which was great.

PGP

I believe that this year was a great turning year for me. I had last year, where I focused a lot on adjusting to a fully English school as compared to a fully french one. But now, in grade 9, I’ve focused on my studying habits and finding out what works best for me not to mention just always trying to better myself and how effectively I work. But, as there is always room left for improvement, I would like to focus on certain habits from the 7 habits which is what we’ve been focusing on the last couple months in our PGP course. Although I do need to use and constantly remind myself of all of the habits in the 7 habits, I’d like to focus on habits 2, 6 and 7; Beginning with the end in mind, synergizing and sharpening the saw. 

In terms of beginning with the end in mind, as I am moving into grade 10 which I still cannot believe to this day, this is the first year of high school that universities look at. Therefore, I’d like to start getting into things and volunteering for things that I’m interested in. Wether it’s the BC SPCA to see if I’d like to do something like that or even just help out at a local veterinary clinic. I am still not too sure what I’d like to be interested in, but for next year, I’d like to focus on trying new things and figuring out what I’m into. 

For habit 6, synergizing, I’ve had some projects where I have worked very well with my group members and some others not so much. To improve on this habit, I would start to find a way that I could do better on working with all of my classmates in projects. 

For habit 7, I realized that when you really think about it, habit 7 is really what life is all about because, you should always try to better yourself and go up instead of down. So, to improve on this habit, I will take the time this summer, as I will have lots of time, to set and achieve goals and eventually become my very best self. 

To conclude, I have found this year to be a pretty successful one, I have learned lots and worked hard and am looking forward to next year where I’ll be able to start a new year with all of the wisdom I have now so that way, I can strive for an even more successful year in grade 10. Now I’d like to finish off my tPOL with a simple question. I have talked about some work habits that I thought I should work on such as my perfectionism and synergizing with classmates, what are some work habits that you’ve observed that you think I should work on or try to improve?

 

We’re All Living In an Important Time In History

So, basically there’s a world-wide pandemic, if you haven’t heard of it, you’re clearly living under a rock, or something even bigger than a rock. If you haven’t heard about the oh so famous corona virus (or COVID-19), you’re crazy, let’s just leave it at that. 

We recently just finished a project in our maker class called Witness To History. In this project, we made videos that would explain how a certain community has been affected by this period of social distancing and self isolation. This project’s driving question was “How can we, as storytellers, tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing?”.  The community that I chose was actually the majority of the Deep Cove community for that matter since I chose fitness as my subject. But first, before I get more into that, let’s go through the milestones we did to get to my final product. 

For our first milestone, as practice, we made videos in iMovie using those trailer examples that they give us. The movies were supposed to be about what it was like before the gold rushes came along (so it was also a stepping stone for our GOLD! project) when the amount of fur being sold was going down and was being replaced by gold, the new “trend”. Here was my video:

Be an Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to learn more?

I think that I did pretty well with this competency because I didn’t just show what we were supposed to have in our videos, but I included some comedy which I think always makes things more interesting and fun to learn. 

 

Next we made our story telling diagram, which would help us narrow down our ideas and form our videos in a story form. Here was mine:

 

Be an Active Digital Citizen: How might I use technology to connect to the world?

I think that I could’ve definitely done better in this competency because I could’ve made my storytelling diagram a lot more detailed and I could’ve added more stuff to the denouement because I only had about one sentence in there. 

 

In our next milestone, we made our own music that we would play in our video, I ended up changing mine in the end but here it is:

 

Be an Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to learn more?

I think I did pretty well with this competency because I became more familiar with GarageBand and how to make my own music. Even though I did changing it for my final video, it still sounded pretty good for one of my first songs that I’ve made myself. 

 

In our fourth milestone, we started to become more visual and think of what we really wanted to see and have in our final products. Here was my storyboard:

Be an Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to learn more?

Be an Active Digital Citizen: How might I use technology to connect to the world?

I think that I did pretty well in these competencies, My video didn’t really end up looking the same but I think that it was still a good blueprint for what I wanted my video to look like and what shots I wanted to go out and get for my video.

 

Next was our actual final video! Here’s how mine turned out:

Be an Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to learn more?

Be an Active Digital Citizen: How might I use technology to connect to the world?

I think that I should’ve done more interviews because this was about our community and not me. There were a couple that I could’ve tried to incorporate if I had more time such as one of my neighbors who is in his 70’s and does water skiing for a hobby or one of my teammates from my soccer team. But overall, I think that I still did well with my competencies because my video wasn’t too long but just enough to get my point through and educate the viewers on how Deep Cove was handling COVID-19. I also enjoyed that I added a personal touch to my video where it was me talking in the frame for my conclusion because I always like to do that in the videos I make. 

To conclude, this project was great for me to change my perspective to a more positive mindset on this whole situation because all I used to think before was not being able to see my friends or play soccer on my school team since our season was just starting. 

Time is $$

Hello and welcome back to another blog post! Today I will be reflecting on my most recent project in our Scimatics course called Time is Money. In this project, we created a product or service to sell where we analyzed the income generated, costs required and time used to figure out if it would be a good service or not as a business prospect. 

Driving question: How can we predict our finances for the future?

Understanding and solving: Apply multiple strategies to solve problems in both abstract and contextualized situations. 

I think that I did a pretty good job with this competency because I had all my time, materials and equipment accounted for in the cost of making my product and performing my service. Another example of me applying multiple strategies to solve problems was that in the making of my final video, I had several audio problems so, I tried things like finding a pair of Apple earphones to make the sound much more focused on my voice, I went outside since it was pretty quiet that day but then I talked to my parents and my dad actually had an old microphone that he let me use which made my audio sound even better. 

Communicating and representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial and symbolic form.

My graph was labelled and explained well, but still, I think that I could’ve improved this competency a little more. Although I had everything I needed (linear equations is used to determine my profit per transaction and hourly wages), I didn’t do the prediction for my NET earnings for over a year. 

Connecting and reflecting: connect mathematical concepts to each other and to other areas and personal interests.

I don’t think I did a very good job with this competency because my video could’ve compared my new business to other ones more. Plus, I didn’t really talk about if my business can cover my costs of living or operating and it’s sustainability on the environment or not. 

To conclude, I really enjoyed getting to learn about linear equations and learning how to calculate your profit in a real-life business using those linear equations. In the end, my video did turn out pretty well: the colours matched and weren’t too crazy, although next time I’d like to add a little more colour and my explanations were clear and very understandable. 

See you in my next blog post!

Alex

Gold, Gold, Gold!

Gold, the world’s most sought-after mineral, prized for its value and unique qualities. And where did that all begin? From the gold rushes of course! This was the theme of our new project. It’s driving question was: How did gold shape a province and it’s people? In our final product, we each made a short video that tells a story that helps the viewer better understand an aspect of the Gold Rush in BC, and how these events played a historically significant role in the development of BC as a province of Canada. In this blog post, I will be telling you how I got there and the milestones I went through to get to my final product. 

Random facts about gold: - Gold is really known as a symbol of wealth, also often used as a time of currency as well. - Overtime, gold’s worth has also went up a huge amount. Today, one ounce of gold is worth 1,710.62$, but at the time of the Klondike gold rush for example, one ounce was only worth about 15$.  - Gold is also thought to have been produced in supernova nucleosynthesis, and from the collision of neutron stars, and to have been present in the dust which is how the Solar System formed.  - Gold is also the most malleable and ductile of all metals. 

For our first milestone, we got to make visuals that basically showed why gold was so important and valued in our society today and in the past. In my photo, I had drawn symbols representing different things gold was used for such as statues, Olympic medals, jewellery, dentistry and motherboards found in computers. I also had something showing how much easier it was to form gold into all sorts of shapes and sizes. My background also even had some symbolization to it; gold is a symbol of wealth, and even when you search up wealth, there is always the same two colours, black and gold. 

Communicate: How do I share my own ideas?

I think that I did a good job at showing my ideas, even with no words. I think that my symbols for each example of how gold is used today is pretty well done: the drawings aren’t too complex, just simple. Which is how I wanted them to turn out. 

 

For our second milestone, we worked in groups (Ciara, Meg, Holly and Gabe) and used Google Earth to create an interactive map that tells the story of the events, people and places that were historically significant to BC’s history. We had to have at least 25 placemarks where each would contain a photo or video and a text describing it’s importance to BC. Click here too see it!

Establish Historical Significance: How do we make choices about what is worth remembering?

I think we did a good job doing what we were supposed to do. We all split our tasks evenly, everyone in our group would choose 5 places and wrote a small paragraph of text for each place. Although, we did have quite a few problems doing the actual Google Earth document, since no ones computers would work, we eventually figured it out and it still turned out the way we wanted it. I think that all of our descriptions for each place were just detailed enough to get say the role that that certain place had in BC’s early history. There were places such as Fraser River, where the first gold rush was, or Williams Creek, which was the birthplace of some of BC’s biggest gold towns such as Barkerville, Cameronton and Richfield. 

In our next milestone, we created character cards. In our character cards, we would complete a card with a photo of someone that we chose, two related artifacts and text that explains the role our character played during BC’s gold rush. We had to choose one real person and make up another one. Here were mine:

Establish historical significance: How do we make choices about what is worth remembering?

Communicate: How do I share my own ideas?

I chose someone named Peter Dunlevey (a real person) who I think is worth remembering because he practically started the Cariboo gold rush after discovering big lumps of gold with some friends. Next for my made up character, I took a picture of myself and edited it a little to make me look older and to make it look like I could’ve actually been in the gold rush. I had searched up the most common first and last names around that time and this was what I found. Obviously, there weren’t many women participating in the gold rush at this time, but I actually did a bit of research and found out that they actually would bring up some women to balance out the men and women a little better. And I surprisingly managed to make a quite a detailed story to explain her life. 

 

 

For the first part of this milestone, we found all of these old videos from an old tv show called Ghost Trails and Ghost Towns where these two people would sit down and talk about all sorts of stories about how BC formed, during the time of the gold rushes. Our task was to create a story spine. The video I chose was about Dawson Creek, the birth place of the Klondike. It was a bit of a challenge to form the notes I took from the video since my video was more fact based and less story based, but I managed to form it pretty well in the end.

The next part of our milestone was our storyboard script, where we would write down what we would say in our videos and what we would show on the screen. I’m not too sure why, but I wrote mine on paper, which made it not look as nice.

Communicate: How do I share my own ideas?

Establish historical significance: How do we make choices about what is worth remembering?

I think that I did a pretty good job forming my video into a story, talking about how Dawson Creek came to be. I also think that I did a good job in narrowing down my ideas and keeping the things that I thought were more important which also helped make it much shorter than the video I was given. 

Our final milestone, was our actual video and final product. Here it is! 

Establish historical significance: How do we make choices about what is worth remembering?

Communicate: How do I share my own ideas?

Just as I said in my previous milestone, I think that I did a pretty good job narrowing down all of the facts and mini stories I was given in the Gold Trails and Ghost Towns video and summed up how Dawson Creek came to be very well. Plus, making it much more interesting to look at without getting too bored since it was a whole lot shorter and had me speaking a little faster in my own video. On the other hand, I definitely went too crazy in cutting each scene so fast, it was too distracting, my audio also seemed to change a lot during the course of the video. I also felt that I left out some really good parts that I could’ve mentioned in my video but didn’t. 

To conclude, it was very interesting to learn about another thing that shaped British Columbia’s history and how is today. It was also interesting to learn how valuable gold was during the gold rushes and that it’s value has only grown since then. 

See in my next blog post!

Alex

DI…but different

Hi and welcome back to another blog post! Today I will be reflecting on our provincial tournament for DI, but if you read the title, it’s way different than you’d think. You see, our provincial tournament was supposed to be held at a school in our general area on April 4th, but of course it was cancelled because of what’s going on with the corona virus. So, our PLP teachers decided that instead, we would have our own provincial tournament on Zoom!

If you’d like to see my reflection on our regional tournament click here.

The things that we planned on having done for provincials were planning on making 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 more, and include way more research in our story.

Since, we weren’t able to meet up in person and we had left all of our props and set at the school, there wasn’t much that we could do to change and improve our presentation other than practicing our presentation more and including more research in our story.

Here was our new script:

In terms of our presentation, we decided to keep most of the roles the same, except this time, Ben was the snake and Kaden was a rat. Also, we took advantage of the fact that using the green screen  effect on zoom, we could use different backgrounds for everyone as if they are in different places. Here were some of the backgrounds that we drew:

Overall, our presentation went pretty well, everything worked out the way we wanted it to: none of us really messed up and it looked the way we practiced and wanted it to look.

The competency we were being assessed on in this project was:

Research and Understand: How might I research and understand a problem, process or challenge using different perspectives?

When it came it problem solving for example, my group and I not being able to do our original habitat morph because we couldn’t meet up and we were doing the tournament virtually, we used the green screen and changed the image from a bunch of dead trees to a bunch of alive ones.

To conclude, DI provincials this year was quite an experience. We got to have a virtual DI tournament and I found out some super cool features about Zoom that I had never known before.

See you in my next blog post!

This isn’t a joke, this is Riel

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:

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 found this a really good article to read since I had never really heard of the Oka crisis, plus, I got to learn more about the pipeline dispute over the Wet’suwet’en people. I also felt much closer to the article because they actually interviewed someone from the Mohawk people that had a close experience to the Oka crisis.

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!

 

DI 2.0

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:

Thank you Malaika (www.blog44.ca/malaikaj) for the amazing photo

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

 

Binoculars Are Lit | A Scimatics Project

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. 

 

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!