Hello again! Today, I’m going to be reflecting on our last unit, Argh Matey. We learned about the age of exploration and about pirates and privateers.

We started the unit by watching the movie Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks. For those of you who have not seen the movie, it is the true story of the Maersk Alabama, a ship that was hijacked in Somalian waters in 2009. It’s a great movie and is shot really well. I won’t spoil it for you, though. You can click here to read more about the actual hijacking.

During this project, we did a milestone a day. This was very interesting in that the project was over very fast.

We also learned about AR (augmented reality) throughout this unit, which I thought was very interesting and about causes and consequences of events.

For our first milestone, we combined what we had learned about AR and about cause and consequences and made a web of causes and consequences for an AR picture we had made. Mine was a rocket that had crashed into the moon.  The underlying cause was that the pilot of the rocket had narcolepsy. The immediate cause was that they fell asleep while piloting the rocket. The immediate consequence of the rocket crashing on the moon was that everyone on board our fictional rocket…. well…. died. Morbid, I know. The long term consequence was that people were sad about the rocket crashing. Wow, as I write this I’m honestly at a loss as to why I would make a story about a narcoleptic rocket pilot who crashed into the moon. I confuse myself a lot.

After that, we started to learn about the Age of Exploration. We learned about the trips made around the bottom of Africa and about Christopher Columbus’s voyages. One thing I am a little disappointed about is that I would have liked to learn some more about Lief Erikson “discovering” the Americas about 500 years before Columbus.

The Europeans who began to make voyages to discover new places were mainly motivated by the three G’s:

•Gold. They wanted to find riches.

•Glory. They were motivated by the prospect of fame and having an exciting legacy.

•God. They wanted to spread the word of God and convert more people to Christianity.

After we learned about that and had some pretty interesting lectures, we made another web of causes and consequences, this time about the European “discovery” of the New World. (I put the word discovery in quotes, because the Europeans weren’t the first people to get there. When the Europeans first travelled to the New World, there were millions of indigenous people who lived there. The Europeans more or less found it for themselves.) Here is my web:

Excuse my messy handwriting.

I have yet to mention the driving question, which was “What was the impact of global exploration?”. We needed to make an AR story to answer that question.

The next thing we did was make a story spine for our AR story. We made some AR objects and put them into the program we were using, AR Makr. Here is mine:

I put the AR object I would be using beside the part in the story spine where it would be used.

Lastly, we made our AR movies. Here is my movie. It took a while to make because I needed to do voiceover for it, and the timing was incredibly difficult to get right for some reason, so if you could take a minute to watch it, that would be great:

That’s pretty much it! I hope you enjoyed all 616 words of this blog post, and I’ll see you next time!

Bye,

Dylan.