Fantastic Photography

    Lately in “Maker” class, I’ve bien busy. Doing WHAT you may ask? Well, I’ve been learning about photography. In this post, I’m going to showcase some photos I took and explain how I took them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this first photo, I learned how to use focus, and “the rule of thirds”. The rule of thirds is a way of taking photos, where you position the main aspect of the scene on one of the lines on      the grid. You can turn this on in settings. Its called the rule of thirds because when you turn the grid on, it splits the screen into thirds. When you follow this rule, your photos become more eye-catching, and appealing. When taking this photo, I made the flowers pop out, by focusing on it, and blurring the background. In order to get nice colours, I changed the brightness, and tweaked the tint and vibrance.

The idea around this photo is to convey feel of mystery. To do this, I made the whole scene dark, and hid the face of the person. The story is that a kid finds a mysterious light in there bedroom. I think this photo shows that story pretty well. To make the mood even more convincing, I changed the light filters using an app called “Snapseed”

 

Here, is a silhouette of my friend. To do this, I took his photo while in a dark room, then turned down the brightness of the photo to make him completely black. After that, I used “markup” to cover the background in white.

After taking all these photos, I’ve learned a lot about photography. I find taking photos fun, and I really enjoyed learning about it. Now, armed with my new skills, I can make ALL my photos eye-catching!

Escape the plates.

The goal of this project was to make a board game using scientific concepts on the subject of tectonic plates.

In order to complete the project, we first had to learn about the concepts we would be putting in our game. This is the “building knowledge” stage. Then, we planned out our rules, and made sure the whole thing would work. Then, once we were sure our game was ready, we built the whole thing. For this project, my parner was Dylan. His name is linked to his blog, so you can see his perspective on our project.

Here are the complete game rules: Escape the plates

Curricular competencies

Evaluating: Demonstrating an understanding and appreciation of evidence.

I have accomplished this by including over 10 key science concepts in our game. There are visual indications of these concepts on our cards, and game pieces. There are cards like: Volcano, transformant plate boundary, slab pull, earthquake, and more, which all do actions based one what they do I real life.

Questioning and prediction: Demonstrate a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest.

All my class time was used effectively towards creating our game. Me and my partner worked well together, and work was split equally. I was focused, and showed interested on the topic. I accomplished this competency, by asking questions, and paying attention in class.

Understanding and solving: Develop, demonstrating, and apply mathematical understanding through play, inquiry, and problem solving.

I have extended expectations by showing a deep understanding of the the mathematical concepts. When including examples of probability in my game rules, instead of doing simple calculations, I performed advanced probability.

Overall, this project was a success. I enjoyed the learning about the topic, and construction the game. Unfortunately, we’ve reached the end of this post. Come back any time!