Hello again (probably), sit down and let me tell you a story, a story on our 2 week project focusing on the European Exploration. This project was really fun and honestly very creative. By the end of this project we should have an AR video explaining the European Exploration and Pirates. Although we only worked on the project for 2 weeks we learnt a lot so we should start now.
We were introduced to this project by watching a movie in class. The movie we watched was “Captain Phillips” made in 2013. It is based of a true story in 2009, it’s about Captain Phillip and his crew trying to move cargo while travelling through Somalian waters but modern pirates in Somalia raid them with ships because they want resources to survive, doing whatever they can to get them because they have nothing left to lose. Analyzing this movie gave us an insight on modern piracy.
A big focus in this project was learning about cause and consequence. For example, something caused an event to happen, and because that event happened there were consequences. There are 2 types of cause and consequence, long term, and immediate. Our milestone 1 task was to create any story we wanted using this cause and consequence chart to understand how we would use one!
Once our story was approved we had to learn how to use AR Makr when we make our final video. AR stands for Augmented Reality meaning we can add digital elements and drawing to normal videos. We learnt how to change the size, rotate, flash, and bounce the images we put into AR Makr. Then we had to take this knowledge and use it to show our story. Here is my cause and consequence sheet: 
This is the point in the project where we started to learn a ton about pirates and the European Exploration. The technologies they used, who made them?, when did voyages become popular, who popularized them? Questions like that. We started off learning about technologies. After going through our notes we got with a partner to do the Sketch & Tell protocol. Sketch & Tell means we have a few minutes to draw out what we learned (in this case technologies),show and explain them to our partner then write down our explanation. This was very helpful as I was able to convey my ideas and understand my partners way of thinking. This was my sheet:
Our Milestone 2 was still about cause and consequence, but about how European exploration allowed for the “discovery” (The Europeans did not actually discover) the new world. The majority of the notes we took to fill our this sheet was about the “Columbian Exchange” and how the resources and unfortunately people were traded with Europe, the Americas and Africa. As well as the fact that an immense disease came because of the lack of medicine while trading killing 95% of indigenous people in the Americas. The Americas were called that because there was the north and the south side and had not been colonized yet. Our cause and consequence sheet was was focusing on the effects of Europeans “discovering” the new world:
Then immediately with Milestone 3 we were preparing for the end (of the project) by creating story spine about an event in the European Exploration that needs to be approved, written to a full script, get that approved, then film a final AR video (which is on YouTube for all you to see at the end). I think this shows that I learnt very well in this project because as was sick the day we were supposed to do the story spine, but I had enough knowledge to do it the morning it was due and not fall behind. A story spine is a way to organize each important event in a story in order to cohesively tell it, this was mine:
After a very easy approval we now had to take our story spine and give it the rest of the skeleton. After trying for a while to keep my script to 2 minutes long I finally had my finished copy. While I was thinking how to articulate this into a video we learnt how to use online drawing sites to get images we made need, as well as learning more about European travel to perfect our stories. My final script looks like this:
Now the fun but very difficult part, having to create drawings that you would be able to see, and understand. It was pretty easy to do since there were little distractions, but also hard because I was stuck for a while on what to draw. I eventually got everything through the collaboration of Sketches Pro and Keynote. Thanks to Ms Maxwell we learnt how to export our images correctly which made this process much easier.
The most aggravating yet rewarding part is now here. Filming our AR video. We were given class time to film, in which many classmates had completed their videos. However I did not so after devising a plan, I went to school at 8 the next morning, spent an HOUR filming for a 2 minute video. After having dogs bark at me a lot I got my final video which relieved so much stress off of my shoulders. Thankfully that day we were given more time do a voice over for our video. All I had to do was go outside, put my video into iMovie, mute the background noise and voiceover. So I did after shortening my script a lot since I realized it would be way too long. I went back inside finalized my video and now I’m proud of it.
So here is my final product:
We were given lunch courtesy of White Spot for finishing our project. I really liked the chicken tenders they had.
To summarize, this project was very fun. Even with all the note taking I was still able to understand and show what I had learnt about European Exploration and piracy. This projects driving question was “What was the impact of global exploration”. I think a good way to understand the impact of global exploration is to know what life would be like without it. Think of foreign foods for example, pizza was known as a luxury food in certain parts of Italy until sea travel and it was used as the first fast food. That inspired people to trade other foods and spices which lead to materials like iron. Our world would be at all what it is right now because we rely so heavily on each other for resources.
Thank you for reading, I’ll see you again very soon!