The Student Blogging Challenge is over now, so now its time for reflection! I thought (some) of the challenges were fun, but the main part I enjoyed was meeting with people from other countries online and seeing their opinions on different subjects and what different things may have influenced those opinions. The challenges were also very educative and I learned a lot of things I didn’t know I wanted to know. I really liked the challenges that had more options because it let people explore and experiment more freely and I think that got lots of people to learn new, interesting things. Overall I think this was a very fun and educating experience, and definitely worth my time, and if you didn’t do it then I definitely recommend it!
Month: December 2018
Week 9 Blogging Challenge
This week’s blogging challenge was on coding, and the first task was to leave a comment on Alex’s blog, here’s mine:
Like I said in my comment, I thought it was really nice that he could stay determined despite his impairment, and because of that he now has a job. The next task was to try out a coding game on Hour of Code, I tried out one of the older Minecraft ones (because why not), and it definitely was an educating experience. 
It is very basic, and really good for new coders, but because of that older, more experienced coders would not be as interested in it as newer ones might be. I personally think that they should create a couple difficulty modes within one game instead of different games with different difficulties. I have a link here: https://code.org/minecraft. (Did you notice the Italics? Thats what I did for the third task, that’s all for now, see you!)
The Battle of Hoth
So, I love Star Wars, and I love stop motion, so for the week 7 challenge, why not make a Star Wars stop motion? I used a free app called stop motion, which works pretty well, and although you have to pay for things like sound effects, its still really good by itself. I couldn’t get sound working for some reason, but I still hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it!
My Worldview
The video above was the most recent (and one of our biggest) of our projects, which was on worldview, which is what you think about different things and what influences that. The end product was supposed to be a video made in an app called Explain Everything, but we had to do a lot leading up to that. The first step was to a questionnaire on different subjects, which we would be able to reflect on later, and would help us understand the concept of worldview better.
The MindNode was the second activity, basically a mind map:
We used it to break down the categories of influences and how they influence us, and we were supposed to choose a couple categories to really focus on. It was really just a brainstorming thing for the Explain Everything, the next step was actually writing a script, which would be what we were going to say in our Explain Everything. The next part was writing a script, mine was a bit more general so that I could be more flexible while recording the Explain Everything. The script went like this: So one day I was a small child, and since I was so small I never really thought there was anyone who had different beliefs and stuff, but then my parents told me and I read some book about how there were different people with different cultures, and it occurred to me that somewhere, there was somebody who thought and did everything different from me. Eventually I kept reading and hearing more about these people and I thought some of the things they did were weird, which was biased by my current worldview. I thought that some of their ideas actually pretty good, and that influenced me a bit but I was mostly influenced by my family and friends. So by the time I was around 10, my worldview was generally complete, although I’m still learning about new things I have my own opinions on. And thats how my worldview has been evolving since then.
The only real problems came about when I actually was working on the Explain Everything, mostly because it doesn’t work and indiscriminately deletes everything you do, but Google saved me (kind of). Some problems I couldn’t fix was the overlapping audio in the first part of me talking, because it somehow was just one string of audio and not two merged, and the other was not being able to get audio on more than one slide, which I combated by using the zoom feature a lot. My Explain Everything is still up there if you want to watch it again, and tell me what you think!