Hey! Our project is coming to an end and with that, it’s time for a summative learning blog post to wrap everything up. It’s time to reflect on the work that I’ve done throughout this project and tie it all together to show how I’ve answered the driving question.

With our project “Think You Can Do Better?” the driving question for this project was How Should We Govern Ourselves? Our job was to create a political party in our groups. With our parties, we created our own values and ideas of what we thought the Canadian government should look like. Overall, there was a lot that I’ve learned from this project through the work that I’ve done.

Something new was introduced to us at the very start of this project. That was the idea of Zettelkasten. Zettelkasten is a German word that translates to ‘note box’. It is a way of taking notes that connects your notes through the idea of tagging. To write these notes, we used an app called craft, which helped with formatting, organizing, and tagging our notes. We use Zettelkasten to take notes on things like government structure, democracy and democratic principles. My favourite thing about the app is how well you can customize your notes to make them your own.

With Zettelkasten, my ideas and notes were better organized which helped me when I had to refer back to videos or text that I needed to reference when writing a blog post. Also, I found that craft was great to link notes with using tags to review all of the research that I’ve collected throughout this project. Zettelkasten is something that I’m going to try to continue to use throughout the school year.

Now, as we were collecting notes and doing research about government through this project, something else important was happening. The 2021 Canadian Federal election was coming to a close. After researching the different party’s running and the election coming to an end, we had a blog post reflecting on the Canadian election.

In my blog post, I talked about my opinion on the current electoral system and what I feel is good about it and what needs to change. Along with that, I researched how voting in a riding worked and created a visual to show how many partys won a riding in each province. I feel though that I need to work on creating a stronger argument in the future for my blog post. I think that if I reference my ideas more and back them up with more information that my blog post will become better overall.

Now to better understand how we should govern ourselves, we created our political parties! I was in a group with Thomas, Kaden, Asha, and Noah. Together we created the political party Alpha Vert. Our party was like the Green Party but we had different values and ideas of what we wanted the future of Canada to look like.

After looking back, I realize how much work it takes to create your party. Our group had to collaborate to generate ideas on what we value and what we would want the government to look like. In the end, we came up with some great ideas. We did a lot of research on the current green parties values and beliefs and built off of those to create our ideas. We then created our Statement of Intent that showed our plan laid out so that any audience could understand our party’s intent.

After all of that, our group created our final campaign ad. In this video, we introduce our party and share all of the values that we feel would help the Canadian government. I’m pretty happy with how this video turned out. I think that our group did well at presenting our ideas to an audience in an engaging way.

Now, with our video done I think I’m able to answer the driving question How should we govern ourselves? Throughout this project, we’ve had to create our political party with our values and create a campaign ad for our party. I feel that everyone has different ideas on how we should govern ourselves. Based on your beliefs and values, some people may feel that we should govern ourselves differently than others. For example, with all of our parties, every single one of them was different in their own way. With our party, we had a completely different electoral system that we wanted to integrate into the government.  We believed that this would give the people more freedom and better representation in government.

In the end I’ve learned that it’s down to what the people think. With democracy, the people have a lot of power to decide what they want the government to look like. The citizens of Canada get to choose how we should govern ourselves. Even just by voting for who you would like to see in government, you are deciding on what you want to see in government and what values you want to see. That’s why I think that’s there not just one way to answer that question. There are so many different ways that Canada could be governed. Every party has their ideas and values that they want to implement into Canada to make it a better place.