Hey guys, I decided to do this in a video form! Enjoy

https://youtu.be/HE71_drfMwA

Growth mindset journal

What’s good lads? Tonight I will be talking about the Destination Imagination tournament we did in class! Don’t worry, this will not contain an April Fools day prank.

What is Destination Imagination?

Destination Imagination is a global tournament where you are put in groups. All groups have a different subject, Fine Arts, Science, Engineering, and Technical. Each one would have a different project. I was in the Fine Arts group and what we had to do was make a music video based off a story. The story that “we” chose was the story of Alice In Wonderland.

One if the big rules is that everything had to our own work or ideas. We couldn’t have help for parents or teachers and had to make the costumes, music, etc. If your team broke that rule they would be eliminated from the tournament.

we also had to choose 2 team elements. Team elements are kinda like a special skill someone on your team has that you can use in the video.

and of course,, we had to make a video

Overall I found this to be pretty stressful but when your group got on a roll, it could be pretty fun.

Guess who’s back, back again, that’s right I’m back with another blog post and if you don’t know me my name is Ben and I’m an 8th grade student in Seycove’s PLP program. I’ll stop talking about me now and start talking about the most recent project!

Another project has come to an end for the PLP 8 class. This one was on worldview and how events from the past effect our worldview today. The driving question was “what can we learn from the past and how does that matter to use today?” I feel what went wrong in the past really  effects us now. Maybe if slavery never happened it could still be going on today! 

This project was fairly short but we did go through a lot of milestones and steppingstones.

First we made a “how it started how its going” meme. This is not the meme we would end up using in the museum though. Here is mine:

Then we went onto Google Arts and Cultures and took notes on the artworks. We looked at the colours, people, clothes (or not clothes in some occasions) and made a MindNode to organize our notes. This is what mine looked like:

Now I’m going to talk bout my favourite milestone. Milestone 2. For this milestone, we had to make a collage on our worldview! We thought of events that had happened in our lives that impacted your worldview. For example, I chose my trip to Arizona because it was the first time going to an US state that wasn’t Washington or Oregon, that would be under the aspect of geography. One of the rules for this is that we had to use our own photos, so we couldn’t take one off the internet. The photo had to be taken by you or drawn by you. I found that easy because most of my events were sporting events I went to.

Then we started about the medieval and Renaissance times. Honestly, I didn’t find is as interesting as some other people. I just found it kinda boring and not as exciting, it was all the same in my opinion. The only time it got interesting was when the christians and muslims fought for the holy land. I though that was pretty cool. A bunch of people took off on horses going out to try to kill other people!?! I thought it was epic. While learning about this, we were taught how to use cornel notes. Using our notes we wrote a test on a past event in the Renaissance or medieval time.

After the test, we were put into 7 groups, 1 for each aspect of worldview. We were separated by what aspect you wrote your test on, I wrote about society, so I was in the society group. The first thing we did in these groups was make a short story by using art we thought best represents our aspect. We had to use a certain story spine for writing the story:

After the story we got to creating the meme, now you’re probably thinking “didn’t y’all already do a meme?” Well yes but this is the final meme. For the final meme, we found a piece of artwork from the medieval or Renaissance times again, it could be the same one from the story, but most people decided to change it. Once we chose our piece of art, we had to edict our face on it ad make it more modern! Here is how mine turned out:

After all of this work, we put our art in a museum and had a big launch over Zoom! We also put our collages in a book!

EVIDENCE OF LEARNING

Before this project, I had no clue that online museums were a thing. Not only did I learn that they, well, exist, but I also learned the process of making one.

In class we are finishing up our laser law project. This project included the Pythagorean Theron, the law of reflection and making a right angle triangle with lasers. So, what is the Pythagorean Theron? The Pythagorean Theron is an equation ( A squared + B squared = C squared) that will determine a right angle triangle. Now, what is the law of reflection? The law of reflection states that the incident ray, the reflected ray, and the normal to the surface of the mirror all lie in the same plane.

To start off the project, the class was split into 2 teams. Our goal was to plant a target somewhere in the room where the other team couldn’t hit it with a laser and the other team would do the same. Once we set up our targets, we put a mirror somewhere in the class to try to reflect a laser onto the target. After this laser tag type game, we had to make a MindNode about the questions we had. I started with a lot of questions and being honest, at the end I really hadn’t answered that many of them.

After the MindNode, we made a right angle triangle using materials we found in our class. This was pretty easy once we got the materials but trying to find things we could make a triangle was a bit harder than I had expected.

After this we did a bunch of math and science worksheets. Once you got the hang of it it wasn’t to complicated. Once we had finished the worksheets we did a quiz on Kahn Academy.

After this, we got to the big part (kinda) we started testing how we would measure our laser triangle by using a ray box and shining it on mirrors. Then was the big part. We made a right angle triangle by aligning mirrors so that a laser would reflect off them forming a triangle. This was my favourite part of the project because we got to use lasers. We also brought in a smoke machine so we could see the lasers better.

Core Competencies

The first core competency was communicating and representing. I feel I showed this by making a triangle on the triangle simulator website for milestone 4. The task was to make a right triangle and measure it to confirm the law of reflection. I also had to have a equation that shows the Pythagorean theorem.

The second competency was Applying and Innovating. I showed this while building the triangle with my classmates Kale and Julian. We showed this by using the correct measurements like the angles on the triangle and the degree the laser reflected at. We also had a pretty good understanding of the Pythagorean theorem and the law of reflection.

The 3rd competency was questioning and predicting. I think i showed this on a wavelength experiment website. We got the play around with the speed, the consistency, the dampening, etc.

Well, that’s about it for this project. It was really fun and I hope to do more stuff with lasers in the future.

In class, we have come to an end in our project about Tectonic Plates and earthquakes. We did this projects in groups of 2, I was with Sepaus. During this project we learned about Tectonic Plates and probability and made a game about those 2 things. Before working on our game, we did some work out of a science text book, and then we went on to an experiment about hot water and cold water. The experiment we did was putting hot water (coloured red) and cold water (coloured blue) and put them in a container that had a divider in the middle, we poured the hot water into one side and the cold water on the other. Once it was filled, we removed the divider to see what would happen. Not surprisingly, the hot red water went to the top and the cold blue water went to the bottom. After the sciencey stuff, we moved onto probability. During the probability course of this project, we did some worksheets on the chances of pulling certain cards and the chances of rolling certain numbers and certain amounts of die.

Answer To Da Driving Question
Question: how does thematic and mathematics effect game design?
Answer: it effects how many game pieces and progress points we put in the game. 6 people can play and you need 12 progress points to win, multiple players can win at the same time so we put in 72 progress points

About Da Game
The game Sepaus and I created is called Monopoly Rebuild. It is named that because it is very similar to the classic board game Monopoly and you have to rebuild 6 areas of the USA, Cascadia, Florida Confederation, Yellow Stone Empire, Greater California, Texas Republic, United States Of New England. The goal is to repair your area after a Earthquake, Volcano, or Tsunami. Throughout the game you will have to pickup area, task or chance cards, a task card will have a job to do on it like fix schools and stuff like that that, you can earn progress points by buying the task, area effects people in the area the card effects, and chance cards can get or lose you progress points. Progress points are used to keep score in the game, first to get 12 progress points wins.

Evidence Of Learning

Curricular Competencies
EVALUATING
This project did end up being a lot harder than I expected. The hardest part of this was coming up with 10 tectonic concepts. Sepaus and I struggled with this but we did eventually figured it out. Our quality of work improved and our weather grade went up and in the end we were pleased with our final grade. Sepaus and I put in a good amount of work and our ideas turned into a decent game.

UNDERSTANDING AND SOLVING
I think what lead us to our success in the end was all of the revisions and editing we had to make. The idea of our game did change a few times over the course of this project but the final game was at the best stage. We spent some of this project learning about probability and tectonic chances which we recorded in a MindNode. One way we learned probability was calculating the odds of drawing a certain card from a deck.

QUESTIONING AND PREDICTING
“How can you relate science concepts to the game?” “How can you calculate probability in your game?” And “how are thematic and mathematical elements used in game design?” Those are the questions we had to think about during this project, and since I already answered the 3rd one, here are the other 2 questions.
We related science concepts with our chance and area cars we included in our game.
For the second one, we answered it with our learning as we calculated chances of rolling numbers on die.

For our first project in scimatics 8 we had to make a graph of our screen time for the week. I really enjoyed this, it was super fun and it really made me think “hmm, I’m on my phone a lot”

Communicating and Representing

If you look at the graph at the bottom of the post about half of my day is on screen time and obviously the other half is non screen time. Now you’re probably wondering what “how many wins Metallurg has” is (and if you weren’t here it is anyway) in this project we tracked screen time but also had to track one other thing. Most people did sleep, exercise, reading etc. Now I’m a huge sports guy and without the NHL I’ve been following the KHL a hockey league in Russia and I’ve took interest in this team called the Metallurg Magnitogorsk, so for my extra thing, I tracked Metallurg, their wins and chances at beating the top 7 teams. This was extremely challenging because the KHL website doesn’t have much in the name of stats so that was fun. How I got the chances at beating the top 7 teams was partly based on the standings but mostly based on how many times they’ve beat them and a tiny bit on goal differential.

Understanding and Solving

I think I did pretty good on this project. I recorded all my screen time, had enough pie charts and graphs and worked around the lack of stats on the KHL website. My oral presentation went a lot better than I had imagined it would go, I (think) I was able to show my ideas clearly. I had definitely planed to say a lot more in my head but I was to nervous and wanted to get it over with quickly. Working with the Numbers app was super cool, I have never used anything like this and just found it cool that I had a bunch of graphs and charts and it could add up my number totals so I wouldn’t have to do any math.

Applying and Innovating

Throughout this project we did 2 quizzes on fractions and I surprisingly did fairly well. I used my class time pretty productively (except for a few Madden Mobile 21 breaks 🤫) and was able to help my classmates.

Overall I would like to spend a bit less time on screens then I currently do and do more productive stuff.

So as this blog post comes to an end, I am going to show you my final project 🥁

And with that, goodbye and remember, shirt. Gov is the only place to get your shirt

In class, we recently finished our project on how the medium is the message. For this project we had a driving question, it was “how does what we hear, read, and see influence us?”. Throughout milestones 1-6 it was around milestone 3 when I got my answer, what we watch on TV and YouTube, what we Google, what we say, what we buy online influences us because our phones and TV’s hear us and know what we search, buy, and watch so it will show ads for products that we will most likely buy.

It all started with milestone 1, where we watching a really long ad on Apple’s HomePod mini called Welcome Home. After watching this ad, we had to write a paragraph on who the target audience and how it reached them. Now this seems like it was easy, I had some trouble with this. I was not very good at finding the target audience for ads but I was able to figure it out.

Then we went on to milestone 2 and 3. These were my personal favourite milestones. We chose a historical ad (it had to be a different one for each milestone) and find the target audience. After milestone 1 I had a better idea on how to do that plus I got to choose the ad. I had lots of fun with these milestones because I got to write about an ad with a kid holding a gun.

Then of course we did milestones 4 through 5 but milestone 6 was the big one. It was our final ad for the local Deep Cove business we chose and in my group it was hectic. We were unorganized and all over the place. Because we we unorganized we had about 10 minutes to make this ad so it didn’t turn out to well but at least we got it done!

This project was, well… “fun” I guess. Well it is now time for me to go and the Metallurg hockey team is messaging me on Instagram so I better go answer! Goodbye until next time.

Final ad ⬆️