Hi again! Welcome back to my blog. Today, I’m going to talk about our most recent project, The More Things Change. Our driving question was “what did European settlement mean for all the people involved?”. To answer the driving question, we needed to work on a thesis statement and put that into an infographic.

For our first milestone, we needed to do a reflection on what life would have been like in Deep Cove 100 years ago. Prior to the reflection, we learned a lot about what it was like to live in Vancouver 100 years ago and about the development of Deep Cove. We then sat down somewhere away from other people and wrote about what it would have been even like if you were in the spot you were sitting in, just a century ago. What would have been there? Would that place even have been there 100 years ago? Things like that.

After that, and throughout the rest of the unit, we spent some time learning about infographics and how to create them. We learned that a successful infographic needs to be concise, tell a story and be visually pleasing. It also needs to catch the eye of the viewer and needs to have a flow to it, so the viewer knows where to start and where to end.

We were also put into partners. I got partnered up with Santi from The Santiago Experience. Here is the infographic we made together:

I focused more on the visual aspect of it, whereas he focused more on getting the facts onto the infographic and the more technical elements of it.

I also drew the pictures you see above the text, which I am very proud of. To design them, I looked at the aesthetic of the infographic template and then found a picture online which I thought fit what the infographic was talking about. I then put the image into Keynote and reduced the opacity of the image. Then, I drew over the images and tried to keep to the aesthetic of the infographic template, adding some shading in places. The template had some of its own visuals, so I tried to keep to that style. I also tried to make sure that the images I chose connected to the groups we mentioned.

For our infographics, we learned a lot about the Fur Trade and the establishment of New France. To really understand what it would have been like to live in the time of the Fur Trade, we did a Fur Trade simulation. For the simulation, we were split up into four groups, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Northwest Company, the Ouendat, and the Haudenosaunee (How-deh-noh-shaw-neeh). We then put tables into a square formation with chairs on the outside all facing into the middle and traded with each other. The reading companies needed to get a certain quota of beaver pelts, and the First Nations groups would make trading propositions with the trading companies. The trading companies then needed to decide whether or not the trade was worth making. I was placed on the HBC (Hudson’s Bay Company) team. There were also variables put into place. In one round, there was a smallpox epidemic, in which some of the people on each team died (I know, morbid, right?). This meant that some of the members on each team could not interact with other people or speak for that round. we simulated the language barrier by not being able to speak to the other teams sometimes and in one scenario, the Haudenosaunee attacked the Ouendat. This meant that the Ouendat had trading goods and some of the people on their team “died”.

The whole Fur Trade simulation was very fun and provided some cool insight into what it would have been like to be involved in the Fur Trade.

Another thing we really focused on in this unit was the continuity and change of New France and now. This meant comparing life in New France to life today and seeing what is the same or similar and what has changed. We also just looked at continuity and change in general too. For example, we can look at the economy. For continuity, farming and agriculture still play a big part in the economy as they did in New France. For change, now things like tourism and the film industry play a part in the economy, whereas in New France, tourism didn’t really happen that much and most definitely not on as large a scale as it does today, and the film industry didn’t even exist.

You may have noticed that there is also a QR code on our infographic.

When scanned, it leads to a YouTube video we made curating our infographic. We also talk about how we animated the video using Keynote’s Magic Move feature in the video description. Here’s the video if you don’t feel like scanning the QR code:

That’s pretty much it. I hope you enjoyed all 843 words of this blog post. See you next time!

Bye!

Dylan