Tag: Field study

The Fallout

“I am grateful to the Executive Committee for this chance to talk to you. I should like to talk tonight — if some of you have long memories perhaps you will regard it as justified — as a fellow scientist, and at least as a fellow worrier about the fix we are in. I do not have anything very radical to say, or anything that will strike most of you with a great flash of enlightenment.”

The quote above is the beginning to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists on November 2, 1945. I chose to start the post with this speech because; 1. We did an analysis of this speech as part of this project, and 2. I think the last sentence of the quote is a really funny way to start my little blog post. 

This project was based around one of the most important projects in history, The Manhattan Project. Now I wont go into depth about what the Manhattan project is for those who don’t know, because the final product for this is an interactive book about the manhattan project!!

Field study!!

Even though it is called the “Manhattan “project, it did not take place in Manhattan. The project was based in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a town that was constructed specifically for the Manhattan Project. Through PLP we got the wonderful chance to do a field study and go to New Mexico to do hands-on learning about the project.

It was amazing to be able to visit historical sites around New Mexico and get to have tours of various museums from some very interesting tour guides. Usually our guides had some personal connection to the museums like working for the Air Force in the past or having spouses and relatives working in nuclear science labs. This made our tours more captivating because our knowledgeable guides always had some facts that you cant find on the plaques.

Capturing in The Field 

Before leaving for New Mexico, we set out plans and to-do’s with our group of where the field team, Declan and I, should film, get interviews, and collect information.

With our little microphone in hand, we filmed up a storm.

Après Field Study – Piecing the book together

When we returned home from New Mexico, our group got back together to check in on what each side had completed. Our home team had already started writing up the chapters and getting a layout of the book. I was the art director for our book and had design ideas right from the get-go of what aesthetic to have, and some page layouts. I worked with Arianne, our lead graphic designer, to crank out some sample pages that we could duplicate and use for each chapter. Our chapters were laid out, chronologically over the time of the Manhattan Project, and we decided to have the first few chapters in a lighter colour palette and then switch to darker tones after the chapter about the Trinity Test to reflect the sombre feelings of what happened after the bombs were dropped. We worked as a team to divide up all the chapters to do revisions and citations and input some amazing videos done by our audio/video people. We spent a lot of time coming up with a thesis around the historical significance of the Manhattan project. We have worked with historical significance before and past projects, so it was not a concept we were unfamiliar with. It was incredibly difficult to have to come up with our thesis towards the end of the book because then we had to go back and change/edit what we had already written to ensure it met the thesis. It would’ve been much easier to do it at the beginning before starting to write any of the chapters or collecting media in the field, but it was a good way to challenge ourselves in the end when we were already crunching to finish the book.

Finally, after a lot of hard work and time spent outside of class, we completed the book. I suggest you take the time to read it through fully and watch all the videos to get the full sense of the story we are trying to tell. I hope you enjoy.

*technical difficulties we cannot currently upload the book due to file size issues. Will get this fixed ASAP!!*

Conclusion 

This project was a lot of fun to work on, and also very serious. I am so thankful for the opportunity to be able to go to New Mexico and touch history in ways that I wouldn’t have been able to without the PLP program. We have worked with historical significance in the past, but this project put it in a new light that was really interesting to work with and I enjoyed working on it. Thank you for reading.

As Always, Brooke.

Going to DISNEY WORLD??!?!?!!

Ever heard of Walt Disney? Or just Disney in general? Me too. Let me tell you about this project that we just did on Disney world. 

The Beginning 

We learned about Disney’s history, how Walt Disney came to create the whole franchise, and how his vision is being lived out today. To capture and sort out of of this new knowledge, we each started a PKM (personal knowledge management) system. My PKM consists of fleeting notes and summaries that I wrote about all of the different texts we viewed to help us understand Disney. You can find those at the top of the page on this link here.

Driving Question + Project

How do Disney theme parks shape and influence the cultural, economic, psychological, and social experiences of visitors?

Once we had gathered some basic knowledge on the origins of Disney itself, we started looking at answering the driving question. To help us solve the question and create the final product, we were sorted into groups focusing on different topics. My group was focusing on “the magic of Disney entertainment” and how the magic relates to the answer to the driving question. We then proceeded to do some research on our specific topics and put them into our PKMs, mine are at the bottom of the page here. 

The product of this project is a video answering the driving question that we made with our groups while in Disney World. So as with any project that involves a video, there was a lot of story boarding, scripting, and call sheets to fill out. We split all these tasks up within the group so that we could divide and conquer but still all be involved with what is going on. We also decided that we all would have to record a voiceover for the final video so that we could all be represented in the final product.

And then the real test finally came, the trip to Disney World.

The trip got off to a rough start with out flights being delayed by a few days but eventually we lifted off from YVR and set sail for Florida. There was a lot of filming to do throughout the week because we also had to do filming for our maker project that I just did a blog post on here. Overall I think we were not as organized as we should have been when we were filming in Florida and it shows in our final video, especially as we start out the video with Sepaus filming the intro in the hotel bathroom. 

The Video 

I now present to you, the magic of Disney and how we answered the driving question;

Our video could have been way more succinct and we definitely didn’t need that much information on the history of Disney, but eventually we did get to the point and answer the driving question. Disney brings nostalgia for America’s past, utopian fantasies of the future, and their world-building stories to life in their immersive performances, character interactions, and parades using highly trained cast members, themed costumes and sets, and engaging light and music.

Conclusion

Obviously it was really awesome to be able to go to Disney world for this project and this is definitely one of the best trips I’ve ever been on. I think my group did a pretty good job with our video and everything that led up to it. I’ll leave you here with some photos that I took during the trip, see you next time!

As Always, Brooke.

I’ve gone viral

Hellloooooo and welcome back to another blog post by Brooke. For this project I had to get into the mind of a professional tiktok star and create some trendy videos that I’m sure will revolutionize your view of trends in the media and Disney world. Well just kidding I don’t think my videos will revolutionize anything but I hope they are still enjoyable. I know this all may sound a little different, so lets jump into why I had to make tiktok videos for a school project.

Driving Question

How do I make effective personal design choices??????

I make effective design choices by staying organized and planning things out. And I hope the rest of this post reflects that 😁.

The Project + Trip

So before we even stepped in to beginning to make our trend videos, we did some much needed personal productivity management. This included organizing our calendars, email inboxes, and most of all, our Things app. I have always been pretty good at keeping my unread emails at 0 and keeping my things to-do’s organized and functional, so this part of the project was pretty easy for me. But it was important that we got a refresher on how to be responsible for our own tasks because we would need to be able to stay on top of our filming when we had our limited time at the Disney parks. We then started researching popular video trends and looking at how we could make our own videos for the trends. Once we decided what types of videos we wanted to do, we then storyboarded and drafted 5 videos that we planned to make during our trip to Disney World. You can find all of my research and drafting in this link to my video research craft document. Once all of this was done we set sail for Florida.

The Videos

Now unfortunately one of my videos was mainly depending on Minnie’s Beach Bash, a breakfast with some of the characters. I was planning to do a character fit check video because I would have had a bit more time to do so at the bash then at the regular character meet & greets. But unfortunately by the time the teachers made the pivot to not have us go to the beach bash breakfast, I became very sick and was not able to go to the last park day where I could have filmed a replacement fit check.

But regardless, I finished 4 videos and I am quite proud of them. Here you can follow the link to see the completed version of all 4 of my videos.

Although some of my videos did not turn out exactly like I had planned, I still think most of them are enjoyable. I think I forgot about the “Filming Borzoi Shaped Things” until it was too late to grab any more interesting footage. It was a it harder to find those shapes than I originally thought 😅.  But still I got 4 out of 5 pre-planned videos complete and I think that is pretty good.

Conclusion

Overall I preformed quite well in this project. I definitely could have done a better job especially at executing the final videos, but my planning was thorough and did my best to stay organized. Disney was also a blast so I think this was a pretty fun project. Anyhoo thanks for reading!

As Always, Brooke.

Learning Advance, Because we Never Retreat.

Now this post is going to be a bit different than my other posts. Yes, this is a reflection post, but this time it is not reflecting on a project that we did at school. The PLP 8s and 9s went away on a learning advance!

A Brief Explanation 

So you may be wondering why I am referring to this trip as an advance, and that is because PLP never retreats! Hahaha lmao yeah its basically just a trip away with my class. We went to Loon Lake Lodge in maple ridge from the 14th-17th of February. We took all of the PLP 8s and 9s so I suppose that was maybe about 50+ kids. I was not super excited to go away on this trip just because I was worried that it was going to rain and be miserable but it didn’t end up raining much and was actually quite fun. So without further adieu, lets get into the day to day.

Day 1

Day 1 schedule

Above is the day schedule for our first day at Loon lake. We arrived at school at the normal time in the morning to start our Book (I’ll talk about that later) and get all of our stuff on the luggage bus and ready to go. Then we departed for the long drive over to maple ridge at lunch and the adventure began. We did a nice little trail walk and scavenger hunt activity to help us get to know the area. Then we were assigned our rooms and I was happily surprised to see that I had my bestie Dana as my room buddy. Then the evening moved on and we went to sleep.

Day 2

Day 2 started bright and early with most of us feeling very tired. The food was good and we were ready to start our morning work block. We worked on our “Believe in Good” project, the personal bank account, and our book. Yes I will talk about this infamous book later in this post.Lunch was followed by an outdoor shelter building activity and some time to work on out DI stuff. We then had dinner and evening fun. After a full day of activities we were quite ready to go to bed.

Day 3

Yet again I woke up feeling not very well rested. It was pretty much the same as day 2 but the outdoor activities were battle archery and forest laser tag. I was incredibly cowardly during battle archery because I did not like the skill-intense confrontational aspect of it. I think that  being too cautious is a common theme throughout my life already so it was funny to see it appear here as-well. However I was a god at forest laser tag and really enjoyed that. Laser tag is something that I have always loved and the way that they set up the laser tag with different guns and stuff just made it that much cooler. I ended day 3 early after dinner and just decompressed in my room for the rest of the evening.

Day 4

Day 4 was the last day up at loon lake and I woke up quite well rested because off the early time off I took on the night of day 3. We did our last outdoor activity as capture the flag and then after lunch we set sail for Seycove.

The Book

Now time to explain this “book” that I have been mentioning throughout this post. This book had sections where we would fill out certain prompts each day that we were there. We would work on this book a lot during advisory group time and most of us ended up having to finish the book at home later. I would highly suggest looking through this book because it is a great reflection of my time at look lake.

Conclusion

Overall this was a fun trip and I think I learned more about how I approach taking risks. Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed my book!

As Always, Brooke.