Month: March 2020

We just finished our latest Scimatics project, and once again, it’s reflection time! This project was called Metaphor Machines, and it was about Rude Goldberg machines and circuits. A Rude Goldberg machine is basically a machine that does something in an over-complicated way, and we had to put an electric circuit in ours. We also had to make our machine represent the scientific method, which is why it’s called a metaphor machine. This was a group project, so my group members were Thomas and Liam, and we focused on the machine itself first. We started off by making a path for a marble to travel through out of metre sticks. We added a lever mechanism, and we tried to add a pulley system, but it didn’t end up working out, so we had the lever end at a switch instead. Then we started working on the electrical circuit, which we wanted to connect to the switch at the end of the machine so that the marble would hit it and activate it. We had to reposition the switch, but we got the marble to hit the switch and turn on the lights at the end. After that, all we had to do was connect it to the scientific method. We had already planned out what we were going to do before we built the machine, so we labelled all the pre-determined parts with something that represented a step in the scientific method. Then we had to make a video showcasing our machine, and here is my group’s:

https://youtu.be/HjSWAA3WE9I

After the machine was completed, we had to update our project start mind map, but by some nefarious mechanism, mine was destroyed (My iPad broke and some of my files got deleted, including my MindNode ones.). I did learn the answers to some of my questions that were originally on my mind map, for example, I learned how circuits would tie into our machines, and how we would be using the scientific method in this project. There were also some core competencies to reflect on for this project, which you can see right here:For questioning and predicting, I feel like I met this competency, because my group managed to finish everything, and usually worked efficiently, although there were a few times where I felt we could be more focused. For reasoning and analyzing, I felt that I met this competency, because we finished our final blueprint with a grid scale and all the measurements we needed. For planning and conducting, I feel like I have met this competency because my group managed to incorporate our circuit into our metaphor machine, and we made a circuit diagram with all the required information… at least that’s what Thomas told me. And for the final competency, scientific communication, I feel like I have met this competency because our video showed how our machine worked, and also had a voiceover explaining how it related to the scientific method.

In conclusion, I learned a lot about circuits and Rude Goldberg machines, and refreshed my knowledge of the scientific method. It was also pretty fun creating the machine and the circuit, and I hope we will be able to do another project with this much hands on building in the future. That’s about it for this blog post, stay tuned for more!

Destination Imagination has returned! It feels like such a long time since I did it last year, but the time finally came, so here is my reflection on the 2020 DI regionals! My experience this year was a lot different than last year, starting off with the challenge. Destination Imagination is split into different challenges, and last year I did the technical challenge, which usually involves making some kind of mechanism. This year, I ended up doing the improv challenge, where you have to act and come up with things as you go along, which is a lot different from what I did last year. I also had different group members from last year, my group members were Noah, Rhiann, Jude, Malaika, and Emily. I’m pretty much done talking about last year’s DI now, but if you want to read about it in depth you can read the post I did on it here. Back to the this year’s DI, this year’s improv challenge was pretty interesting, it was called To The Rescue and it was about superheroes. The skit we had to do had to have a villain who uses a superpower to cause a conundrum, and then the hero steps in with and saves the day with an underwhelming power. The villain’s power, the conundrum, and the hero’s underwhelming power are all randomly selected, which is the improv part. On top of all that, we also had to enhance our skit with sound effects. There were also few more minor details that are covered in DI’s official video on the challenge, which you can check out right here.

Our group started off by doing forms. Lots and lots of forms. They covered thing like which materials we could use to outlining the challenge requirements, but the really important ones were the ones that had to do with the elements of the challenge itself. Since the randomly selected villains power came from a pool of about ten or so powers, we had to research them so that we would know everything about whatever power was selected during the challenge. However, the conundrum and hero’s power are a different story, because while the villains power comes from a preselected pool, the conundrum and hero power can both be anything, which helps buy into the improv idea. To combat this, we came up with random powers and conundrums to use during our practice sessions, which I’ll get to in a bit. While they were a bit boring, all these forms helped us understand everything about the challenge, which gave us an advantage at the end, so I’m glad we did them. There was still a big part of the challenge we had to focus on before the tournament, and that was the sound effects. We were allowed to have a box with a bunch of objects in it as our sound effects, nothing electronic allowed. We were thinking of having different people make the sound effects during the performance, but eventually we decided to have one person do them for the whole skit, which was Noah. For the actual sound effects, right off the bat we started coming up with things that could make basic sounds, but in our early practice sessions we realized there were still lots of situations where Noah couldn’t really make a sound for. To minimize those situations, everyone had to come up with items that could make a sound corresponding to every villain superpower, and then bring them in for our sound keeper. The last big thing we did before the tournament was practice. We came up with random conundrums and heroes powers, and a random villain superpower from the pool. This way, we would never know what was coming and would have to go along with it, like we would have to in the actual challenge. After doing a lot of these random skits, we started to realize what we needed to improve on the most. There were a few minor things, like not talking over each other, and making sure you face the audience. These weren’t that hard to overcome, you just had to think about what was happening from your scene partner’s or the audience’s perspective. Then there were more major ones, like our lack of sound effects. While we had gathered all the sound making objects we needed, we didn’t really give Noah much time to put in sound effects, which could cost us a lot of points at the tournament. We started to practice giving really obvious cues so that Noah would have time to put in sound effects, and it took us a while to actually incorporate it into our skits, but we worked it out eventually. We also had a problem where we would drag out one thing because nobody knew what direction to take the skit, and then before we would know it our time limit was up. We decided we needed a narrator to give context to our scenes, and move the scene along if it started slowing down. That narrator ended up being me. It took some practice to get used to, but eventually I started to feel confident with my role and the ability of my team. We had started out pretty bad, but the practice had payed off and we had improved a great deal. We were going to need everything had learned though, because after all that time we spent practice the tournament was knocking on the door.

On the day of the tournament, we had our instant challenge before our actual challenge, which we did pretty good on it, giving us a needed boost of confidence. Then the time finally came, and we went in and did our performance that we had practiced on for so long. I think our challenge actually ended up being pretty good, because we got a bunch of sound effects in, we didn’t have any awkward pauses, and we managed it work with the challenge elements we were given. Not that it wasn’t without flaws, we ran out of time at the very end of our skit, although it didn’t ruin our skit because we were pretty much at the end anyways. Personally, I think I did my job as narrator, although I think I could’ve sped things up a bit in parts where it started to drag on. Despite the flaws, I still consider it a success, because now we have an even clearer idea of what we can improve on, and I also managed to demonstrate the Research and Understand competency. I feel that I demonstrated it when researching the challenge and practicing, for example when we were considering how our performance would look to the audience and judges, or when we were practicing to think from our fellow group members perspective so that we could play off of what they did better, or to give them opportunities to do actions or make sound effects.

Well that’s about it for this blog post, I’m sure we’ll improve a lot in the provincials, so stay tuned for that!

We just finished another project, and now it’s reflection time! This project was called “Let’s Get Riel!”, with the driving question of “How can we present past actions and decisions through images to help us make decisions of what is fair or unjust?”. In case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t spell real wrong, because Riel is the last name of Louis Riel, who was a big focus of the project. You probably don’t know who he is, and we didn’t either, so we read this comic book about him throughout the project, creatively titled “Louis Riel”.

We’ll talk about Mr. Riel more later, because our first milestone actually had nothing to do with Louis Riel. Our first milestone was a current event that had to have happened fairly recently. After some research, I decided to do a particular incident which was part of the recent Wet’suwet’en protests, which I found quite interesting. Current events are always fun to do, and I think this milestone is a good example of my Connect competency, because I got to read about other people’s thoughts on the issue while researching it, and eventually got to form and write about my own opinion.In the next milestone we got to find out what the end goal of our project would be. We were put into partners, I was with Holly, and we had to choose our own event to analyze and decide if it was ethical or not. We also had to create our own driving question, and some images that represented our event, which would then be posted on a class instagram page. Holly and I started out by choosing an event to analyze. We ended up choosing the Douglas Treaties, which we had to research, and then put all the information we found on a worksheet. We found out that the Douglas Treaties were a bunch of treaties signed with First Nations tribes on Vancouver Island, except they were pretty dubious, and nobody knows if they were legit or not. This made a pretty interesting topic, as the whole project was about ethical dimensions, and I think that this was another good example of my Connect competency, because me and Holly alike had to discuss our perspectives of what we had researched.

For the next milestone, we started to work on the prototypes for our Instagram images. I had come up with the idea for a kind of internet “phishing scam”, which is kind of what happened with the First Nations during that event, because they got scammed. I also realized that phishing sounds like fishing after Holly informed me, and the First Nations were promised fishing rights that they never received, which I thought was quite clever.After receiving feedback on our prototypes, Holly and I finished our final drafts for milestone 4, which we ended up sharing to the class. We had created a total of three images, as well as an Instagram caption to go along with them.I think this milestone is a great example of the Understand Ethical Dimensions competency, because we formed and shared our own opinions through the images we created. We supported them with evidence we gathered from our research, and in turn we showed our understanding of ethical dimensions.

Hey, remember Louis Riel, that guy I was talking about at the beginning of the post? Well, we had been reading the book throughout all the other milestones, and found out that he was a Métis leader who opposed the Canadian government and ended up being executed, but we got to form our own opinions on the ethical dimensions of the events in the book in the final milestone, which was a literary response. I really enjoyed this milestone, because I had developed some of my own opinions while reading the book, and now I got to write about them. I also think this is another excellent example of the Understand Ethical Dimensions competency, because I got to read about a historical event, form my own opinions and support them with research, and show my understanding of ethical dimensions.This project was a short one, but I actually really enjoyed most of it. I found the book quite interesting, and it was fun to write about my own opinions, as well as creating the images. I hope that we get the opportunity to do something like it in the future. That’s about it for this blog post, make sure to stay tuned for more!